Using Spritefonts? Help me figure out a solution for this issue please...

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  • The Basics:

    So I've been getting into using Spritefonts recently. While the Spritefont tools by R0J0hound and blackhornet do a great job with modifying and generating them. I noticed one big flaw in both tools and would be interested if anyone knows an easy solution for this.

    (Software Downloads: R0J0hound Software | Blackhornet Software)

    The Issue with Unique Characters:

    Imagine you have a font which supports unique characters. The problem is that both tools use an absolute value for their character-set. Meaning instead of fetching a list of all available characters from the selected font. They only go by a limited set of characters that you have to expand by yourself.

    This basically means that you are pretty much required to Google together an entire list of unique characters by yourself and this can get very difficult for languages like Japanese, Chinese or Arabic.

    The search for Automation Tools:

    After searching the web for a typography tool to get the full character-set of a selected font. I couldn't find anything useful besides the ancient "Character Map" tool, that comes bundled with Windows since the dawn of time but that doesn't have a multi-select option.

    My call for Help:

    So how did other developers using Spritefonts deal with this issue? Did you guys just ditch Spritefonts in favor of Construct 3's native font object?

  • You won't be able to create spritefonts for languages like Chinese, because they have tens of thousands characters. Japanese is possible, but only for the hiragana and katakana.

    If you need a universal object that supports lots of languages including Chinese, you will have to use Text object.

    I usually just google the alphabet for a particular language, copy/paste it into Word, use Find/Replace to remove all unnecessary characters like spaces. Shift+F3 to change case. And that's it.

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  • You won't be able to create spritefonts for languages like Chinese, because they have tens of thousands characters. Japanese is possible, but only for the hiragana and katakana.

    If you need a universal object that supports lots of languages including Chinese, you will have to use Text object.

    Figured that would be the case, which is a shame really.

    I usually just google the alphabet for a particular language, copy/paste it into Word, use Find/Replace to remove all unnecessary characters like spaces. Shift+F3 to change case. And that's it.

    That's what I've been doing so far. Do you have any specific sites to make this easier on a per-language basis? Maybe sites that have the character-set as comma-separated values or in a different list format.

  • That's what I've been doing so far. Do you have any specific sites to make this easier on a per-language basis? Maybe sites that have the character-set as comma-separated values or in a different list format.

    Unfortunately, no. Just using the best result I can find in google..

  • Generally you don’t want all the characters in a selected font. A font can have anything from a few characters to the entire Unicode character set of around 4 billion.

    I guess it should be possible to parse a font file and find all the characters defined in it. All the different font formats are documented online.

    But generally with a spritefont you’d only want the characters you use in it. Especially with construct spritefonts since they aren’t packed densely. You can eat up a lot of vram with too many.

    You could make a tool to look at all the text files in a project and list all the unique characters and use that?

  • Hi!

    I work with the publisher Ratalaika Games and often help him with ports of games made on Construct 2/Construct 3.

    Creating the right Spritefont images was a big challenge, especially finding the right characters, so I made my own "mini program" on Construct3 that can get a list of characters from your text. This way I get the entire Character Set, which I then generate in the program that you specified earlier, and it works great for me.

  • Generally you don’t want all the characters in a selected font. A font can have anything from a few characters to the entire Unicode character set of around 4 billion.

    I guess it should be possible to parse a font file and find all the characters defined in it. All the different font formats are documented online.

    I understand that but I think a detection algorithm for unique glyphs within a font would solve the issue of 4 billion characters. I'm also aware that your tool is limited by the web and might not be able to support such a feature but I found a paid tool which does what I mentioned today. I did manage to only export a comma-separated character-set and used your tool to do the sprite-sheeting work.

    Thanks a lot for creating and providing your tools for free by the way!

  • Hi!

    I work with the publisher Ratalaika Games and often help him with ports of games made on Construct 2/Construct 3.

    Creating the right Spritefont images was a big challenge, especially finding the right characters, so I made my own "mini program" on Construct3 that can get a list of characters from your text. This way I get the entire Character Set, which I then generate in the program that you specified earlier, and it works great for me.

    This tool is great and I appreciate sharing it with me but it also comes with the issue that the copied text is "absolute". Basically meaning that if your pasted text is missing unique characters of a selected language. They won't end up in the character-set.

    It should still work fine though. Pasting in all translation strings should do the trick. Thanks again!

  • > Hi!

    > I work with the publisher Ratalaika Games and often help him with ports of games made on Construct 2/Construct 3.

    >

    > Creating the right Spritefont images was a big challenge, especially finding the right characters, so I made my own "mini program" on Construct3 that can get a list of characters from your text. This way I get the entire Character Set, which I then generate in the program that you specified earlier, and it works great for me.

    This tool is great and I appreciate sharing it with me but it also comes with the issue that the copied text is "absolute". Basically meaning that if your pasted text is missing unique characters of a selected language. They won't end up in the character-set.

    It should still work fine though. Pasting in all translation strings should do the trick. Thanks again!

    This works great for me for translating the game into Japanese and Chinese, since yes, there are sooo many characters and it's worth using only those characters that are used in your text

    Also, when I generate Spritefont in the "SPRITE FONT GENERATOR" program, I usually use 2 fonts for Japanese and for other characters, and then combine them in Photoshop. Of course, I would like Ashley to implement some kind of SpriteFont generator in Construct 3 itself for a long time, it would be a great solution for developers

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