Text Blitter Character Maps

[Cossin]

How do you set these up? I mean, Am I suppose to just guess where things are suppose to go?

I looked at the examples, but they still don't really explain how you are suppose to do the character maps. Alright, so I used the search button. Someone says that if you use an Active Object, you won't get anti-aliased fonts from the generator.

I then type it into an AO to get the map


I get to the CharMap, and I guess, I'm suppose to somehow know where the Offset/Size are supposed to be.


However, It seems no matter what I do, I always get a half-cropped image or deranged letters

Where exactly is the starting point of the Charmap, or how is it being aligned?

So if someone would please properly explain how to use the text blitter character map, you would save me 3 hours of work. I can't use text blitters default generator because it anti-aliases the font, causing pixelated colors around the edges. (yes, I have already tried using 256 color .MFA file. I just cannot get this Charmap to go in sync with the letters at all.

[pirodaggar]

The size and space are what determines the char size, so that everything is monospaced. Offset is the distance between the characters when you type.

Are you sure it anti-aliases the font? I've used it before and that wasn't the case.

[Cossin]

Yes. As you can see in the top left, the font is white. it has no outline.


Displayed in the text blitter, it for some reasons adds a black outline, even though all I did was set the font.

The result


if you compare this to the font in the top left corner of the first picture, you can see that this is barely readable

[pirodaggar]

Ah i suppose you're right. If you change the font back color to whatever color it's on it'll anti-alias it to the correct background.

What I said should work though, the problem is your char map isn't mono-spaced and you don't have the right perimeters in it.

[Cossin]

what do you mean by mono-spaced?

[pirodaggar]

meaning every character has the same amount of space. For example, this text isn't monospaced because the i character takes up less space than the G character. GiGiGiG. See how they're close together? In mono-spaced, the i character will look like it has padding on one (or both) sides.

Give each character a box the size of your biggest character (Which looks like a capital letter like M), and make sure each of your characters has enough white space around it to make up a box around it. Think of it like a grid.

[Cossin]

Well, I made the grid-like boxes like you said. I tried changing around the size/space/offset, but with no luck.


It still gives me gibberish. Honestly there must be another way of doing this. Anyone else that currently use text blitters know how to add custom fonts or do character maps?

[Werbad]

Why not use the built in generation? If you disable font smoothing the incorrect anti-alias should disappear.

[Cossin]

where exactly do I disable font smoothing at? I do not see an option for it in the text blitter generator.

[pirodaggar]

Your image box isn't the right size :P It's not even, so if you fix the border, it works great

http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/4152/exampleft5.jpg