assets.md

assets

BMFont Generation

See text-modules and the LibGDX wiki for a list of different BMFont generation tools.

JSON Object

This module operates on JSON descriptions of BMFont files that look like this:

{
     pages: [
         "sheet_0.png", 
         "sheet_1.png"
     ],
     chars: [
         { chnl, height, id, page, width, x, y, xoffset, yoffset, xadvance },
         ...
     ],
     info: { ... },
     common: { ... },
     kernings: [
         { first, second, amount }
     ]
}

See here for the full spec.

converter

You can convert from/to various BMFont formats to the above JSON with convert-bmfont.

npm install convert-bmfont -g

For example:

#convert to JSON
convert-bmfont Arial.fnt > Arial.json

#convert to binary
convert-bmfont Arial.fnt -f bin > Arial.bin

parsers

Or you can parse various font formats on the fly in Node and the browser.

• parse-bmfont-ascii (text)
• parse-bmfont-xml
• parse-bmfont-binary

loaders

For convenience, the load-bmfont module wraps the above parsers for Node/Browser and provides fallbacks for XHR1.0 browsers.

var load = require('load-bmfont')
 
load('fonts/Arial-32.fnt', function(err, font) {
  if (err)
    throw err
  
  //The BMFont spec in JSON form 
  console.log(font.common.lineHeight)
  console.log(font.info)
  console.log(font.chars)
  console.log(font.kernings)
})

packed binary

For further optimization, you can pack a number of font styles/sizes into a single binary file, and then decode that at runtime.

• pack-bmfonts
• unpack-bmfonts

For example:

pack-bmfonts fonts/*.{xml,fnt} > fonts/all.bin

Then, a XHR2.0 implementation for unpacking in a browser (with Browserify) might look like this:

var xhr = require('xhr')
var unpack = require('unpack-bmfonts')

xhr({
  url: 'fonts/all.bin',
  responseType: 'arraybuffer'
}, function(err, res, arrayBuf) {
  if (err) 
    throw err

  var array = new Uint8Array(arrayBuf)
  var buffer = new Buffer(array)
  var fonts = unpack(buffer)
    
  //do something with your font array...
  console.log(fonts)
  console.log(fonts[0].common.lineHeight)
})