Glyph Designer BMFont Export Format
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This section describes the contents of the BMFont output format used by Glyph Designer. The BMFont format was originally created by Andreas Jönsson and can be found at http://www.angelcode.com. Information about BMFont format was taken from information found on that page.
Glyph Designer provides a number of different output options:
- BMFont Text
- BMFont XML
- BMFont LUA
- BMFont Binary
- Sprite Kit
In the drop down list of export types the list is a little longer as it also lists some different file extensions as well e.g. .txt and .xml. Regardless of the file extension, if BMFont is mentioned in the export type then the contents of the export will adhere to the BMFont format, but laid out as required by the format being used e.g. text or XML.
This article will cover the contents of BMFont output. It will not specifically cover the Sprite Kit export format which is proprietary to Glyph Designer, but the contents of that file format are the same as BMFont, but not formatted in the same way.
info
face - Fonts display name
size - Font size
bold - 1 = bold, 0 = not bold
italic - 1 = italic, 0 = not italic
charset - Not used by Glyph Designer
unicode - Always set to 1 as all glyphs use unicode
stretchH - Fonts height stretch. Always 100%
smooth - Not used by Glyph Designer
aa - Always 1 in Glyph Designer
padding - The padding within each glyph image (up, right, down, left)
spacing - The spacing between each glyph image on the texture atlas (horizontal, vertical)
outline - Not used by Glyph Designercommon
lineHeight - The distance in pixels between each line of text
base - The number of pixels from the top of the glyph to the base line
scaleW - Not used by Glyph Designer
scaleH - Not used by Glyph Designer
pages - Always 1 when using Glyph Designer
packed - Not used by Glyph Designerpage
This tag gives the name of the texture file to be used with this control file
id - The page id which is always 0 for Glyph Designer
file - Filename of the texture file to usechar
This tag describes the characters and glyphs within a font. There is one for each character in the font.
id - The characters unicode id
x - x location for the top left corner glyph image in the texture atlas
y - y location for the top left corner glyph image in the texture atlas
width - Width of the glyph image within the texture atlas
height - Height of the glyph image within the texture atlas
xoffset - How much to adjust the x position of the glyph when rendering it defined by font metrics
yoffset - How much to adjust the y position of the glyph when rendering it defined by font metrics
xadvance - How far to advance the x position to render the next glyph in the string
page - Not used by Glyph Designer
chnl - Not used by Glyph Designerkerning
The kerning information is used to adjust the distance between glyphs between certain characters. This allows letters such as o to sit under W e.g.
first - The first character id
second - The second character id
amount - Amount to adjust the x position for the character +/-
