It’s been a very long time since I’ve made an update here.  I’ve been working steadily on the font editor module for the Gorgon editor and it’s finally nearing completion (the last 99% of 99% of 99% etc…).

I’m quite proud of this thing.  It’s supports a pretty well rounded suite of functionality for designing a bitmap font for use with Gorgon.  Besides the usual standard stuff like font outlines, font faces, styles, etc… it also supports glyph brushes, custom glyphs, glyph advancement and offset editing and custom kerning pair tables.

Here’s a few images:

These show the glyph gradient brush and the custom glyph functionality.  Images showing the outline effects can be found in the gallery.

There are 4 supported glyph brush types in the editor:

• Solid – Basic coloured brush.
• Gradient – An editor linear gradient brush.
• Texture – A brush that paints each glyph using the defined texture.
• Pattern – Various patterns.

The custom glyph stuff is basically like clipping a sprite from a larger image.  And since glyphs can proportional, you obviously need to adjust it so that there’s no overlap (unless you want it) with other glyphs in the text.  You can clip your custom glyph and adjust its advancement and offset until it mixes in well with your text.  If you want really precise control, you can also define kerning pairs (not finished yet) to get better placement depending on the surrounding characters.

And finally, there’s a secondary outline colour.  This allows us to create interesting effects with the glyphs like glowing letters or hollow letters.

It’s come a long way since I last did an update.  And I’m pleased with the what I’ve managed to do with the editor at this point.  As always, the code is available on the subversion repository if you want to give it a test run.