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Old 19-03-17, 06:05   #2
Niveus
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LAYING OUT THE FONT
  • 1.1 Once you have selected your font, and you're ready to go, open GIMP. Go to File > New... and create a new image with the dimensions 256 by 256 pixels.


    Fig.3

  • 1.2 Go to the layers stack, select the “Background” layer, and delete it using the 'bin' icon.


    Fig.4

  • 1.3 Create a new layer using the 'blank page' icon (near the 'bin' icon we just used in the layers stack).


    Fig.5

    A dialogue will open asking for input. Dimensions should be automatically 256 by 256 pixels, so under “Layer Fill Type” select “Foreground colour”, which by default when opening GIMP will be black.

  • 1.4 Once you have your new black layer, select the Text tool (bold 'A' icon) in the tool box.


    Fig.6

  • 1.5 Make sure the foreground colour is white (click in the palette, and move the cross-hair to white), and have your font selected (you can type it to find it quicker). I am using Parkinson Medium. We will worry about size later.


    Fig.7

  • 1.6 Next, click onto your image and a text layer will be created ready for you to type your text. We need to type here every conceivable character that tomb4 will need when displaying text.

    You can also put here any custom symbols that you want, to make your game unique, but bear in mind it will take up the space of an already existing character. I'll show you how to do that later on in the thread.


    Fig.8

    Here I've already written what I will be using for you to copy paste if you like (cross referenced with the original map used by TR4):
    Code:
    abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789@%#&¿?¡!£$+-*()/<>çàáâ".~;:,='←↑→↓
    The three As after the cedilla (or, 'squiggly c') are there for their diacritics. Later we will erase these three As.

  • 1.8 You then need to readjust the size of your text layer so that it all fits to your image. Click and hold in the ruler on the left, and then drag the curser over the image to create a guide. You can see how far along in pixels the guide is in the image, in the bottom centre-left. We want the guide to be 2 pixels along.


    Fig.9

    Let go once it's at 2, and your guide will be dropped on the image. We want to create one at 254 pixels along, as well.

    The reason we are using guides is because we want the text layer to be as large as possible, to maintain the quality of the font, but not too large that the borders we are going to add later will spill outside the boundaries of the image. Guides is a simple way to do this.

  • 1.9 Once you've got your horizontal guides, we want vertical ones, as well, at the same distances. Click the ruler above the image and drag onto the canvas. First guide at 2 pixels, second at 254.


    Fig.10

  • 1.10 Next, we want to drag our text layer border so that it's against the guides. So, click on the Text tool in the tool box again like we did in 1.4 (adding guides automatically selects the Move tool). Then, click on the text layer so that it becomes active again.


    Fig.11

  • 1.11 Then, we want to click and drag the handles (small boxes in the corners of your text layer) towards the corners of your image. Now, they should snap into place along your guides. You may have to zoom out (CTRL + scroll wheel) to find all the handles.


    Fig.12

  • 1.12 Now, we need to adjust the text so that it displays well in game. Highlight all your text by clicking and dragging in the text layer.

    In the Tool Options, make sure “Antialising” is ticked.
    This smoothes out the text into the background, using the alpha channel.

    The level of “Hinting” should be full.
    This fills out the text to create a fuller border, so when we add a black border later, the borders are less jagged.

    We need to change the “Kerning” of the text to 2 pixels.
    Any font that still has overlapping characters at more than maybe 4 pixels is not worth using: the spacing will look horrendous in game.
    The Kerning is the spacing distance between the characters. We need to increase the spacing so that we avoid ugly text clipping in game due to the character borders we apply in Leikkuri later overlapping with other characters.


    Finally, we can now adjust the size of the text so that it fills out the image. Increase it to the maximum size you can without the text spilling outside the image.


    Fig.13

    If you like, when you can make the text no larger without it spilling outside the image, you can decrease the line spacing so that the text squishes together a bit more. Then you can increase the size a bit more. Be wary of not letting the characters get too close together, though.

  • 1.13 That's the first part done with.


    Fig.14
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