NFont
by Jonny D
NFont is a bitmap font class (C++) and a struct (C) for SDL. With it, you're able to make really neat fonts to appear in your applications. NFont is easy to use and has nice features like support for the newline character ('\n'), animation, and extended ASCII support (codes 33-126 and 161-255). Use the font metric functions like getHeight(), getWidth(), and getAscent(), which all handle multi-line text, and the control of letter spacing and line spacing for a ton of utility. You can even load TrueType fonts when you use SDL_ttf (just #define NFONT_USE_TTF and link with SDL_ttf). Text-block alignment is provided through three simple functions: draw(), drawCenter(), and drawRight(). If you need to be more specific with the position of your text or you want to animate the characters, use drawPos(), which accepts a function that you write to control the output positions of each character. If that's not enough, you can replace the whole process with drawAll().
NFont uses the very relaxed MIT License so you can feel free to use it in any sort of project, statically linked or not.
The latest version is v2.0.0. This version represents some conceptual cleaning and focuses on the NFont interface. I was prepared to go off the deep end and make NFont work for both SDL and OpenGL (by way of textures), but I've decided that it needs to stay simple in order to remain and become even more useful for the SDL 2D framebuffer. I might make a new library that handles OpenGL text. We'll see :). Either way, NFont's interface has changed toward simplicity. The NFont class acts now like a namespace, holding independent functions as static methods. NFontAnim has been merged with the NFont class and there's a single static animation data structure. The drawing commands all return the dirty rect, for use with Sprig's dirty rect management or your own. Memory management has been simplified. NFont no longer frees any surfaces automatically, so you don't have to worry about who owns a particular surface (you always own it). Loading an NFont is now done through one of the constructors or the overloaded load() function.
The documentation is still in the works. It'll be out soon enough. Plans for the future also include better international support (really unicode, perhaps?) and I might try to add an interface for specifying the bitmap font format for compatibility with other bitmap font formats.
Sample Fonts
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Example usage:
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#include "NFont.h"
// in main()
NFont myFont;
myFont.load(screen, SDL_LoadBMP("myFontPic.bmp"));
int x = 50, y = 100;
myFont.draw(x, y, "Here's %s text!", "some");
// flip screen
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| NFont | A complete and very simple to use C++ bitmap font class with text-block alignment, full newline support, few function arguments, font metrics, TrueType font support (through SDL_ttf), extended ASCII support (i.e. international characters) and even color changing and animation. Everything you need to create an NFont is in the links to the right. See the example for some more free code. |
SDL |
Latest
v1.71 |
MIT |
| NFontC | This is a port of NFont to the C language. It has a slightly different style to make it easy and comfortable. | SDL |
Latest [Google Code] v1.71 2/11/09 [Download] |
MIT |