Hiero

Hiero is a bitmap font packing tool. It saves in the Angel Code font format, which can be used by BitmapFont in libgdx applications.

Running Hiero

Hiero can be run from source or from the nightly build:

On Windows

java -cp gdx.jar;gdx-natives.jar;gdx-backend-lwjgl.jar;gdx-backend-lwjgl-natives.jar;extensions\gdx-tools\gdx-tools.jar com.badlogic.gdx.tools.hiero.Hiero

On Linux/OS X

java -cp gdx.jar:gdx-natives.jar:gdx-backend-lwjgl.jar:gdx-backend-lwjgl-natives.jar:extensions/gdx-tools/gdx-tools.jar com.badlogic.gdx.tools.hiero.Hiero

It can also be run via JWS, though this is a slightly out of date version: Hiero Java WebStart

Rasterization

Hiero rasterizes TTF fonts using Java's font rendering. Kerning is supported. The output is usually of reasonable quality and allows various effects to be applied, such as a drop shadow, outline, etc. At small sizes, the output can be poor for some fonts.

Alternatives

Glyph Designer

Glyph Designer is a commercial bitmap font tool designed specifically for Mac. It allows you to create beautifully styled text with custom backgrounds, gradient fills, gradient strokes & shadows. The command line interface allows you to export multi-lingual character sets and target multiple device profiles. At time of writing Glyph Designer is priced at $39.99

BMFont

The BMFont tool uses FreeType and can produce better results at small sizes. It can also do supersampling, providing smoother glyphs. BMFont does not support effects like drop-shadows or outlines, but glyphs can be output with padding and effects applied with Paint.NET, Photoshop, etc. Typical export settings are here.

BMFont is Windows only but can be run using Wine. There are reports that it hangs if the space character is exported. The space character can be added manually, eg:

char id=32   x=0   y=0    width=0     height=0     xoffset=0    yoffset=0    xadvance=3     page=0  chnl=15

Change the xadvance as needed, this is the number of pixels for a space character.

TWL Theme Editor

The TWL Theme Editor has a font tool that also uses !FreeType, though it doesn't support the super-sampling. Theme Editor JWS.

gdx-fontpack

The gdx-fontpack tool also uses FreeType. It doesn't yet support super-sampling.

FontPacker

The FontPacker tool is written in C# and uses .NET's TextRenderer, FontFamily, and Graphics classes to render.

ShoeBox

ShoeBox has a tool for creating Angel Code fonts.

JME

jMonkeyEngine has an Angel Code font tool, though it looks simplistic and most likely uses Java's font rendering, same as Hiero.

bmglyph

The bmglyph tool is for OSX only and hasn't been evaluated.