Font Creator Transparent Background!

[Ozden79]

Hello There,

Using the Font creator which comes along with GLBasic, is it possible to set the background color to transparent? I'm asking this as I want to use AntiAlias for smooth drawing of the fonts and in that case the backcolor cannot be removed from the created font correctly.

Thanks,

Ãâ€"zden

[Moru]

Sadly this is not possible with the font tool, I would like this too. As it is now you have to create the font yourself in photoshop or some other art-program that can handle alpha-channel.

[Ozden79]

Hmm, this shouldn't be hard to do, I already coded transfering font data to some other devices before, all that needs to be done is not to draw a backcolor on a 32 bit surface as png output support is already there...

Anyway, might probably end up writing mine...

Ãâ€"zden

[Quentin]

did you try to use SETTRANSPARENCY before LOADFONT? Should work. e.g. if you use a white background for your font instead of black, use it as follows:

Code (glbasic) Select Expand


SETTRANSPARENCY RGB(255, 255, 255)
LOADFONT "sample.png", 0

PRINT "Testing it", 0, 0
SHOWSCREEN
KEYWAIT


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[Moru]

The problem is not transparency, the problem is 8 bit alpha channel and anti-aliasing :-)

[Ozden79]

Yes,  I use SETTRANSPARENCY already and that's fine until you use an Anti-Aliased Font. In this case, the only fix in here is to be able to have a transparent background.

[Moru]

To make this a bit more clear, here is an example showing two letters with anti-aliasing and a normal 1 bit transparency looks like.

Upper row: 1 bit transparency, note that the green background doesn't blend well with the edges of the font.

Bottom row: 8 bit transparency, the eges blends nicely no matter what the background color is.


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[Quentin]

ups, sorry, seems I didn't understand the problem well

[Kitty Hello]

the Font creator so far can't do alpha-pixels correctly, so it's a 24bit bitmap with a colour key cookie cut. Just add an outline and make the outline non-AA.

[FutureCow]

There's a free font creator I found the other day that can do this. Unfortunately you really need to wait for a couple of weeks (according to the author) for the next version. The current one doesn't produce the font as a fixed width font and as a result you have to do a lot of post-processing work moving all the letters around afterwards to have it work with the standard print commands. The quality of the fonts produced though (particularly in small fonts) with anti-aliasing is beyond pretty much any of the free font programs I found when looking last week.
http://www.ironstarmedia.co.uk/blog/fancy-bitmap-font-generator/

I'll post on the forums when the new version is available, but in the meantime you might want to try it and manually move the letters around when you have a font produced that you like.

[Moru]

This tool realy makes cute fonts. Sadly it won't do the characters in a proper grid so I had to change the proportional font library to load and kern it properly but now it's working!

Download here: http://gamecorner.110mb.com/index.php?page=bitmap-fonts-proportional
Also download that nice font generator tool while it's free :-)

[MrTAToad]

Your program works very well Moru - I changed from the fixed-width fonts to proportional ones (found a decent fixedsys-like one), so I'm happy