One of these days I’ll stop bugging you with ideas and let you get on with coding *grin*

1) Allow me to choose (a) whether I want a link in my start menu, and more particularly (b) where it goes on the start menu. I’d like to be able to put “Iron Star Media” under my “game development” subfolder to keep my start menu clean
2) Show the font changes automatically without having to click “generate” each time
3) An inner bevel on the font would be a nice effect
4) As would just an outline without the interior of the font
5) Possibly allowing you to point FBFG at a directory of non-installed fonts that it could use?
6) Instead of “start” and “end” characters, you might want to add some “common” options – eg. all lowercase, upper and lower, just the numbers, 0×20-0×7E.
7) This one gripe I have with the software :- I was trying to install it and was on a PC with a slow internet link. The program started pulling the latest .net off the web (without asking whether I even wanted to install it), as well as doing some other internet communication, though I’m not sure what.
I would really like to see a download that does a totally offline install. Not having the right .net version at the very least should ask me if I want to install it – or better yet, refuse to install FBFG until I have the right .net version.
It would also have been nice to have had a “requires .net version XYZ” (plus any other requirements) on the website at the download point.
Another feature I’ve seen on other programs – I don’t have any personal use for it myself but it’s an idea for you – is having a preview text box you can type something in to see how your text will look when you use the generated font.

If I come up with any other ideas I’ll let you know. Thanks for the great program!!!

Thanks for your feedback. This is just the sort of feedback I was hoping for before releasing our next version – perfect timing!

I hadn’t even thought about using an image texture for the characters, but with our new ‘modular FX’ system, that’s going to be an easy one to add – and it’s a great idea. We’ll make sure that there is a decent pile of options for each ‘layer’ too, so that we can include a ‘one texture per character’ or a ‘one texture for the sprite sheet’ option.

We’ll add options for the sprite-sheet layout too in the next version. So you can customise what the background is like, the padding for each character and whether or not it’s fixed width boxes. The font-preview also is a great idea – I have also just added that to my feature list .

Thanks again for your post. It’s great to hear that people are using this little utility and I’m looking forward to adding all of the features you have suggested. I hope to get the next version out in a couple of weeks and I would love to hear what you think of it when it’s available.

Many thanks for getting in touch.

After playing with the features of the various font generators, here’s my feedback on some features I’ve seen in others that I’d like to request/suggest for later versions :-

1) The big feature I found on others which I would love to see on this one is the ability to apply an image texture to the characters instead of a solid colour or gradient. This would allow me to do something like putting cow spots on letters, or having a rainbow gradient rather than just 2 colours.

If you add this feature at a later point (will grovelling help my case? – the one thing that would really make your product stand out as I can’t find this on any font generator that supports textures, would be to be able to change the size of the texture when applyign it to the font. (e.g if you had a rainbow texture, it would be great to be able to resize it anywhere from applying a rainbow to each character, to applying the same single rainbow across the whole font).

2) Can we have the ability to change the grey colour that each letter is drawn on? (which then becomes white in the final outputted png file). If the font colour was white and the background was white, transparent drawing (without post processing the font) wouldn’t be possible.

3) My programming language’s (GLBasic) bitmap font implementation supports only fixed width fonts (which I then apply a kerning routine to). To save me having to take each font produced and move all the letters to line up with a grid, being able to generate each character with the same width/height would really be a timesaver.

4) And finally (I don’t want to push the friendship with too many suggestions off the bat *grin*), a font preview when you’re selecting your font to help you pick the right one would be handy too.

As I said at the start, this program is fantastic! Thanks for making it available!!

Regards
Shane

Thanks for the positive comment – it’s always nice to know that people are downloading and using our tools and/or assets.

Thanks for the suggestion about the addition of extra characters. I’m working on putting Unicode support into the next version, so that you should be able to use absolutely any characters from within a font. The first version of pretty much a ‘proof-of-concept’ so it’s great to hear suggestions like these so that we can make the tool more useful to the community over the coming weeks.

Take care.

When I get another evening free I’m going to recode chunks of it to allow for any number of filters and also to accept icon files as inputs so you can easily make spriteFonts of a set of icons!

Best of luck!