Comments in custom font files?

Custom fonts are very important but seem to have some restrictions:

errors ("lineheight" instead of "lineHeight", tabulators or other "typos") are not identified by the compiler and lead to a simple "Error 100" or crashes
no comment? I did not find a possibility to add information in the fnt files, which would be useful

Any other obervations?

If you are talking about a .fnt file, I don't see a way to include a comment with the standardized format. I think CIQ should use the standard.

As far as catch more formating error, a bug report is the way to go.

travis.vitek over 8 years ago

The only documentation for the BMF file format that I was able to find was here. You can see the source code of the generator here, but it doesn't write any comments either. There is no mention of support for comments, but the format is fairly rigidly specified (you must use lineHeight and not lineheight). While it is good for a program to be generous with the inputs it reads, and it doesn't seem like a bad idea in this case. It isn't really necessary, but it would be nice.

As an aside, the BMFont tool can generate an XML file instead of the BMF file, but the resource compiler doesn't know how to handle the XML font files. You could theoretically write out/edit XML files with comments in them, and then write an XML to BMF transform and then compile that.

Travis

PUFFOLINO over 8 years ago

I would have used comments to document which symbol has been used for certain things, like "heart symbol (character 'h')" - now I am doing a final check by showing the bitmap and it's defined areas using another tool: IQ ShowFont