Table Of Contents

Overview
Screenshots
What's Different?
What's New?
What's Been Removed?
What's Next?
Licensing
Version History

Overview

MudgeFont is a bitmapped font generator tool. You tell it what size bitmap you want, specify the font (face, height, weight, padding), and it will generate all the data you need to render that font on screen.

MudgeFont was originally written by Tom van Dijck, and was posted to Flipcode as the Code Of The Day on May 19^th, 2003:

http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/msg.cgi?showThread=COTD-FontGenerationTool&forum=cotd&id=-1

My MudgeFont web page is here:

http://www.midwinter.com/~larry/programming/mudgefont/

http://www.midwinter.com/~larry/programming/mudgefont/mudgefont.zip

Screenshots

Everybody likes screenshots. So here are a couple of exciting action shots of MudgeFont actively in action!

mudgefont.1.png

Mudgefont working over a lovely Futura medium font as a 256x256 texture.

mudgefont.2.png

Mudgefont operating on the same Futura medium font, but this time as a 512x512 texture. Since that affords you lots more space, I've made the font larger as a result. I also turned on "Show Rectangles" so you can see the characters delimited.

mudgefont.3.png

Mudgefont still on the same Futura medium font, but this time I've turned on "Force Monospaced" (and reduced the font size accordingly).

mudgefont.4.png

Restored the font to proportionally-spaced, and added some extra border padding below the '/' character (on the top line).

What's Different?

Here is the complete list of changes I've made to the original MudgeFont source:

• The original tool filled in the generated bitmap with white, then overdrew it with all the characters from the font. But the border around each character was left alone. This meant that in the final bitmap there were white boxes around every character. And since the TGA exporter used the bitmap pixel's color to determine the resulting pixel's transparency, these boxes was propogating to the TGA file, which showed up in the output now and then due to rounding errors in computing the texels. I changed it so the bitmap is seeded with black.

• Similarly, the original tool wrote out its TGA file with entirely white pixels, using only the alpha channel to carve out the characters. This meant that Photoshop displayed the resulting TGA as a unbroken field of white, and the only tool I had handy that displayed it properly was DXTexTool. I changed the exporter so that 100% transparent pixels were black, leaving all other pixels as white. This doesn't look perfect in Photoshop, but it yields the general idea. (Why not scale the white by the transparent color? Just in case you actually render the font texture, instead of say using a diffuse color or another texture.)

• I changed all the "border" controls to accept a range from -255 to 255. They used to only go from 0 to 16. This means you can squeeze out wasted pixels on the top and bottom of each character, which means you can get higher resolution characters for the same size bitmap.

• I added "top" and "bottom" border adjustments for individual characters. (I used this to add some extra space below _ in one font so it wouldn't bump into the character underneath it.)

• It used to be that you could only "Add Characters" to the list of characters... if you wanted to delete characters, or rearrange them, you were out of luck. Now it's a full-fledged "Edit Characters" dialog, where you can add or remove characters at whim. And it's got a nice big easy-to-read monospaced font, so it's easy to work with.

• I made the dialog box larger, so that now an entire 512x512 texture will fit in the preview window without scrolling around.

• I added "Force Monospaced", which forces any font to be a monospaced font. Specifically, it forces all characters to be as tall as the tallest character, as wide as the widest character, and it centers each character horizontally (but not vertically) in this space. New in version 1.0.3: "Force Monospaced" now allows you to force monospacing individually for the X or Y axes.

  Note: After I added this feature, I realized that you can easily convert any font into a monospaced fonts from your font engine. Just draw each character as wide as the widest character, centering it in the extra space. (That's all my "Force Monospaced" code in MudgeFont did, anyway.) Turning on "Force Mononspaced" means wasting precious space in your texture, pixels which would be much better spent making your fonts look good. I suggest you don't use it. But I've left it in, in case you have texture space to burn and for some reason you can't modify your font loader.

• I fixed the file loader so that it changes the texture height & width radio buttons to match the file as loaded.

• I changed the crosshatch filled into unused area of the bitmap view to use lovely purple colors instead of just black and gray. Similarly, I changed the rectangles drawn by "Show Rectangles" to be green instead of gray. Now you can tell which is what, where!

• I expunged all warnings generated during compilation.

• I changed everything that said "mudFont" to say "MudgeFont". All relevant files and identifiers. Mr. van Dijck was a bit inconsistent about whether the tool was "mudFont", "MudgeFont", or "mudGE Font builder". And sadly, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of my small mind. Also, this helps distinguish this new version from the old mudfont files that are surely even now cluttering up your hard drive.

• I changed the file extension from ".fnt" (bad choice, that's the original extension for bitmapped font files for Windows) to ".mudge".

• I changed the File Save and File Export code so it automatically generates a filename for you—the filename that, 99% of the time, you were going to type in anyway. I also turned off the "Are you sure?" alert boxes, 'cause they irritate me. (Yes, I'm sure! Stop asking!)

• I cleaned up the menu. I added ellipses to every menu item that brings up a dialog box, and added the Help menu (which only contains an About dialog and a link that launches you to the MudgeFont home page).

• I converted the .TGA export code to write a packed struct directly to the file, instead of the hand-coded "write this field now write that field" code.

What's New?

I added a Python script, mudgefontxmlto.py, which makes it easy to convert the XML file into another format. Currently it supports three formats: INI, C, and my own funny text file format "Twiddle". Feel free to hack it up so it writes the file format you need. Just create a new subclass of writer and overload the __init__(), write(), and (optionally) close() methods as you need. If you know any Python at all (and you should!) you won't have any trouble.

What's Been Removed?

Just one thing so far: I've disabled the hacked-up downsampling "antialiasing". A Flipcode user named "Steven Wittens" posted to the discussion saying it was a bad idea:

Never, ever, EVER anti-alias text by downsampling a high-resolution version. This is exactly what has caused a lot of people to dismiss text anti-aliasing as simple blurring. By downsampling, edges will lie on half-pixel offsets and will become blurry.

A properly anti-aliased letter will still have sharp, crisp edges, but also smooth curves where necessary. This is done through hinting, and all this work is destroyed if you downsample.

What's Next?

Probably not a lot. MudgeFont now does everything that I need, and is pretty well behaved. It has some warts, but nothing I haven't gotten used to. So I'm not likely to spend a lot of time on it from here on out.

That said, I'd welcome submissions. Or, heck, even notes of thanks. (Haven't gotten a single email about MudgeFont... you people sure are quiet!)

Licensing

Here is the original license that shipped with MudgeFont:

/**
 * Copyright (c) 2003 mudGE Entertainment
 * 
 * This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. 
 * In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising 
 * from the use of this software.
 * 
 * Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, 
 * including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute 
 * it freely, subject to the following restrictions:
 * 
 * 1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; 
 *    you must not claim that you wrote the original software. 
 *    If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment 
 *    in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.
 * 
 * 2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must 
 *    not be misrepresented as being the original software.
 * 
 * 3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.
 * 
 */

/*
** Changes Copyright 2004 Larry Hastings
** 
** All my changes are released with the same license as the above.
** 
*/