Creating fonts

[Brick Nash]

Does anyone have any information about creating a font and a font file for use within AMOS?

The manual describes the various instructions to fetch and use fonts, but nothing on actually making the fonts or a font file. Even the font editor seems to assume that you have a ready made font which can be loaded and edited, but that initial "how to" for actually creating them seems to be missing.

I have a lovely character set of 8x8 letters within a single .iff image file, but I've no clue what to do with it in order to turn it into a font for use with the Text instructions.

Thanks.

[Samurai_Crow]

If it's colorful, you'd be better off converting it into icon banks because the text commands are monochrome, I think.

[Brick Nash]

Ok that's easy enough to slice up and import. How would I go about using them with strings and the like though? Or is it just a case of writing custom code to assign a bank number to a letter?

[Samurai_Crow]

Use the ASCII code to represent each letter in the icon bank minus 32 for all the non-printable characters.

[Dan]

Hi
here is a code,which converts a text string into positional numbers.

A$=" ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890"

TXT$="A TesT853"

For X=1 To Len(TXT$)
  Print Instr(A$,Mid$(TXT$,X,1))
Next

You only need to create an icon/sprite/bob or whatever bank (or maybe to an extra screen ?), holding the images corresponding to the A$ string, then paste the images accordingly.

But pre-rendering the text is maybe necessary for slower machines or to speed up the game.

[Brick Nash]

Excellent! Thank you everyone.

I had thought about just doing full words and sentences as icons or Bobs, but I wasn't sure.

[Brick Nash]

Ok just a little follow up question:

I used Dan's code and tweaked it a little, and it works great at fetching the Icons from the bank. I get a nice little typewriter effect if I put it in the loop as well.

The problem is that by using Icons the text is underneath any Bobs I put on screen. I switched it so that the text is now Bobs too, but I can't seem to find any other instruction other than "Paste Bob" that works, and as far as I can see you can't set the Bob number for that (and hence can't set the priority).

Using a new Bob for every single letter seems a bit bloated, so I was wondering of there was another way that I'm perhaps missing?

Thanks once again for all the help!

Here's what I'm doing in the code:

Procedure FONT_TEXT[TX,TY]

Shared WORDZ$

A$" ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.,*........."

TXT$=WORDZ$

For X=1 To Len(TXT$)
TF=Instr(A$,Mid$(TXT$,X,1))
Paste Bob TX,TY,TF
TX=TX+8
Next
End Proc

And this is in the main Loop

Do
If writetext =0 : Rem This just stops the text being written once it's done
wordz$="Hello"
proc TEXT_FONT[20,150]
writetext=1
endif
loop

[adrazar]

If you want moving objects behind the text, the most versatile option is to turn the text into Bobs. One Bob for each letter is indeed not a very good solution, it's better to group them into larger units.
I think the natural way to go about this from your current program is to have the FONT_TEXT-procedure convert the input string into a Bob-image, which it then reveals as a Bob at the given coordinates.

Here is how I imagine the procedure could be implemented, in pseudocode:

Procedure FONT_TEXT[TX,TY,LINE$] (<- An ideal procedure for having the LINE$ to be output included as a parameter)
- Paste the font Icons into a hidden screen letter by letter according to LINE$
- Store the result as a (temporary) image in the bob bank.
- Assign the image to an unused Bob, which is to be placed at coordinates TX,TY
End Proc

You should probably extend the list of parameters to also include the Bob number and image number you wish to use.

Alternatively, it might be more convenient if the procedure could assign those values automatically..
To that end, I had an approach like this in mind:

Global LINEBOBIMAGE,LINEBOBNUMBER
Procedure FONT_TEXT_RESET
   LINEBOBIMAGE=200 : Rem Any image number beyond the end of the original bank will do
   LINEBOBNUMBER=32 : Rem Leave some lower Bob numbers for the objects behind the text
End Proc

These two variables can be used by FONT_TEXT to determine which Bob image and Bob number to use.
Then if FONT_TEXT adds 1 to both variables right before reaching End Proc, the next time FONT_TEXT is called from the main program the incremented values will be used instead.

One must with this method remember to call FONT_TEXT_RESET regularly in order to keep the used Bob- and image numbers within a reasonable range.

[Dan]

To draw the text (pasted bobs) at top of the other bobs, draw them just before the end of the loop.

something like this:

Do
  cls

  Proc KeyBD
  Proc GameLogic 
  Proc Moveplayer
  Proc MoveEnemy
  Proc DrawPlayer
  Proc DrawEnemy
  
  Proc Do_FONT_TEXT   

  screenswap
Loop

[Brick Nash]

Thanks for all the great advice folks!

I used everyone's techniques, although my code is a bit clumsy and needs serious optimisation, but it does work and the text is displaying on top of everything now.

[Arne]

For 1-bit fonts I use the excellent FED 1.3 on the Workbench 1.3 Extras disk. It can be copied to a WB 3.1 install (into Tools folder preferably). It supports both fixed width and proportional (variable width) fonts. It saves directly in the OS Font dir. I usually save with incremental names for each version because there is some kind of cache issue when going back and forth between AMOS to print out Quick Fox test strings.

In AMOS:
Get Disc Fonts
' This generates a Font$() name array which you can search.
If Left$(Font$(F_IND),8)="MyOwnFon" ...
' To set:
Set Font F_IND
' To render:
Text 100,100,"Wheee!"

As for FED, you need to experiment a bit to learn what Kern, Space, Width etc all do. Also, FED doesn't quite update WYSIWYG as it's quite ancient. Still, certainly one of the better WB1.3 tools.

[davideo]

Originally Posted by Arne

In AMOS:
Get Disc Fonts
' This generates a Font$() name array which you can search.
If Left$(Font$(F_IND),8)="MyOwnFon" ...
' To set:
Set Font F_IND
' To render:
Text 100,100,"Wheee!"

When trying this with Amos my system hangs and eventually Guru`s

Tried with Amos, AmosPro and AmosProAGA

Any hints on what may be missing on my set up to cause this?

Otherwise anybody got a 6 point font bank?

Thanks

[Samurai_Crow]

Amos fonts are not AmigaOS fonts. They're all 8x8. If you want to use AmigaOS fonts, the AMCAF extension has support for them.

[davideo]

Perhaps I've not been clear in my post.

I would like to open an AmigaOS font with a 6 point size, i.e. aavd 6

But when I use Get Fonts and set the font to the one I want my system crashes.

Even the examples within Amos do the same!!

[Samurai_Crow]

Perhaps I was unclear in MY post. Amos doesn't support AmigaOS fonts except using the AMCAF extension.

[davideo]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Perhaps I was unclear in MY post. Amos doesn't support AmigaOS fonts except using the AMCAF extension.

I must have had this at sometime because one of my old programs allowed me to change the font on screen to an AmigaOS font!!

Any idea where I can grab this along with some instructions on it's use please?

Update - located it on Aminet

[Arne]

My install is vanilla, and I was using FED/Workbench (=<3.1) fonts for my AMOS projects back in the day, from floppies, harddrive, and compiled, friends' machines, and more recently in many emulator setups. No modern thirdparty add-on thingy should be needed for rendering old (variable) pixel fonts at least (intellifont was some different vector thing which I never looked into). Not sure why it might be crashing for you. Could be a bad Amos install, or maybe the FONTS: assign is missing making Get Disc Fonts go haywire. Or you tried my code as written setting font to "0", though that doesn't cause problems for me. I omitted the for loop and error checking.

Edit: Tested it on Amos 1.3, and it seems to load and render all the wonky old WB fonts, like Ruby, Emerald, Sapphire, etc. Big fonts render slowly. Small fonts are faster. Kerning and such works properly.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Perhaps I was unclear in MY post. Amos doesn't support AmigaOS fonts except using the AMCAF extension.

It does using the Get Fonts, Set Font and Text commands.

[Samurai_Crow]

Ok. I'd never gotten them to work except 8×8 fonts without AMCAF. Maybe it was just the font bank feature of that extension.