New way of handling text strings

[Jon]

Guys,

I was about to sit down and write a program to create a graphic representing a text string given a set of input alphabet PNGs/GIFs, but I realised that there aren't actually large individual letter graphics in the resources, just full strings like MAP01 and 'NEW GAME'.

If whoever has done the alphabet could provide a set of indvidual letters, it would take about 10 minutes for me to write a script to create *any* text string using them. It would be a great help if all the letters were the same dimension too, but its not essential.

This would mean if one guy wants to call MAP14 'macdonalds drive thru' and then later on someone else makes a new MAP14 and wants it called 'Burger King Baby Changing room' we can make the resources in a snap.

any ideas?

(like a lot of stuff we've made in the development of freedoom, this would of course be of great use to other project, not just freedoom :)

[oblivion]

also make it easier when the next day you realise that its not Macdonalds, its McDonalds :D

[boris]

The Doom fonts does not distinguish between upper- and lower-case, does it? ;)

[DooMBoy]

All Doom font is uppercase.

[andrewj]

It was me made the current font. If you like, I could send you all the png files (or upload them to incoming). There's uncolored (RAW) versions at 12, 15 and 30 pixels high, and a whole bunch of colored versions at 12 and 15 pixels high.

BTW, the program you mention sounds good

[Jon]

Thats great- mail them to jon @ frad.org as PNGs, and I'll get cracking :)

(coloured ones preferrably)

[SyntherAugustus]

can somebody put up a link to the doom font so I can use it name my upcoming levels and make a title header for the menu of icd-boom?

[boris]

Older versions of ZDoom (like 1.17c) had each character of the Doom font in zdoom.wad.

[Jon]

Don't use the doom font to name your upcoming freedoom levels, as the doom font is copywrited :) if you wait a few days I'll have the generator up and running. Right now its almost done - I generated a sample font (haven't cut up ajapted's existing one yet) and wrote the code to create the png, I'm just fiddling with handling all the seperate image files easily and vertical alignments when the letter heights vary.

[cph]

boris said:
The Doom fonts does not distinguish between upper- and lower-case, does it? ;)

The "fonts" used in some of the main menus do - well they use a font where all individual letters are in caps but the capital letters are shown larger (I guess this is what is meant by a small caps font?).

E.g. m_loadg is "LOAD GAME" (all caps) whereas m_lgttl is "Load Game" in small caps.

Of course there's no reason for us to do the same.

[fraggle]

DooMBoy said:

All Doom font is uppercase.

If you look at the letters in the menu, the "lower case" ones are smaller than the "upper case" ones.

[Jon]

Presently it will support any character that has been created. I've got a big pic of all of Ajapted's letters but I can't cut it up right now (I don't have a paint program handy, and I don't know enough about the GIMP to use that) if anyone else would like to do that, I'd do it for you. There's different scales so I could provide for lower-case letters too.

[mmnpsrsoskl]

Yeah send me the font picture, me needs something to do.

[andrewj]

The font images are now in FreeDOOM's FTP incoming dir (ajapted_font_art.zip), for anyone else who wants to hack on them.

Jon: if all you need is the coordinates of each letter, I could do that with the GIMP and send you the list.

[Jon]

Preferrably I'd like the letters in individual files called A.png, B.png etc. hopefully mmnpsrsoskl is doing that now. :)

[mmnpsrsoskl]

Yeah, so you need them with a blue/aqua/whatever that bluish colour is background?

I cut up the size 12 and 15 ones, and the letter Q is a bit bigger cause of the tip thingo...

Anyhow, i'll just god fix 'em up and i'll send them to ya and put 'em on my webpage...

[mmnpsrsoskl]

Did you need anything else done to them or was their something wrong with 'em? If so, feel free to yell at me and tell me your problem :)

[Jon]

They're fine thanks :) if someone wants to play with it, you can here:

http://alcopop.org/dev/font/text.pl?font=moo&string=blah

replace 'blah' with a string of your choice. Currently, changing font makes no difference. Also if you type a character that doesn't exist, it will just throw an 'Internal Server Error' and not a descriptive failure. Spaces are plus signs, so 'you+frad' translates to 'you frad'.

If you want to know what characters are available, take a look in http://alcopop.org/dev/font/12/

Should be finished soon.

[boris]

Very nice! :)