I’m in the process of making my own set of fonts and what a process it is…
I do this using an Image with a sheet of 16*8 tiles, or glyphs, as I’ve seen that they’re called. On every glyph there is a printable letter in Ascii order. Since I want a pixel-feel to my game I’ve also got a smaller set of letters and symbols on the bottom of the Image.
I position these letters with the help of a grid, which is a time-consuming process.
Now to my code - my FontHandler. In this I have the ability to render a string, render a string in the centre of two X-coordinates, and render a string “boxed”, so that automatically makes a new line. In order to do this I have a huge switch with every printable letter which gives an offset value to the specific character, so that “love” doesn’t render “l ove” etc.
I’m planning to add more fonts and every font requires its own switch statement, resulting in a long, long an messy class, but it’s the only solution I can see. My question is if anyone has any hints or tricks regarding bitmap-fonts.