Terrarum-sans-bitmap/README.md

Terrarum Sans Bitmap

This font is a bitmap font used in my game project called Terrarum (hence the name). The font supports more than 90 % of european languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. More technical side, it supports Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Ext-A, Latin Ext-B, IPA Extension (required by some languages), Greek, Cyrillic (+ Bulgarian, Serbian variants) and the supplement, Armenian, Thai (beta version), Georgian, Unicode Punctuations, CJK Punctuations, Kana, Chinese (limited to Unihan and Ext-A), Hangul (all 11 172 possible syllables) and Fullwidth forms.

The JAR package is meant to be used with Slick2d (extends Font class) and LibGDX (extends BitmapFont class). If you are not using the framework, please refer to the Font metrics section to implement the font metrics correctly on your system.

The issue page is open. If you have some issues to submit, or have a question, please leave it on the page.

Little notes

• You can't display Bulgarian, Russian and Serbian variants at the same time without some more codes; reload()ing them or creating multiple instances of the font would be the easiest solutions.
• All Han characters are in Chinese variant, no other variants are to be supported as most Chinese, Japanese and Korean can understand other's variant and to be honest, we don't bother anyway.

Design Goals

• Sans-serif
• Realise (some of) handwritten forms
  • Combininig with the sans-serif, this stands for no over-simplification
• Condensed capitals for efficient space usage

Using on your game

• Firstly, place the .jar to your library path and unzip spritesheets, then:

Using on LibGDX

On your code (Kotlin):

class YourGame : Game() {

    lateinit var fontGame: Font

    override fun create() {
        fontGame = GameFontBase(path_to_assets)
        ...
    }
    
    override fun render() {
        batch.begin()
        ...
        fontGame.draw(batch, text, ...)
        ...
        batch.end()
    }
}

On your code (Java):

class YourGame extends BasicGame {

    Font fontGame;

    @Override void create() {
        fontGame = new GameFontBase(path_to_assets);
        ...
    }
    
    @Override void render() {
        batch.begin();
        ...
        fontGame.draw(batch, text, ...);
        ...
        batch.end();
    }
}

Using on Slick2d

On your code (Kotlin):

class YourGame : BasicGame("YourGameName") {

    lateinit var fontGame: Font

    override fun init(gc: GameContainer) {
        fontGame = GameFontBase(path_to_assets)
        ...
    }
    
    override fun render(gc: GameContainer, g: Graphics) {
        g.font = fontGame
        g.drawString(...)
    }
}

On your code (Java):

class YourGame extends BasicGame {

    Font fontGame;

    @Override void init(GameContainer gc) {
        fontGame = new GameFontBase(path_to_assets);
        ...
    }
    
    @Override void render(GameContainer gc, Graphics g) {
        g.setFont(fontGame);
        g.drawString(...);
    }
}

How to Use Color Code

Color codes are individual unicode characters. While you can somehow make a raw character and paste in on your code, it's certainly not desirable. Fortunately, we're also providing utility functions for the color codes.

GameFontBase.toColorCode(rgba4444: Int) -- returns String
GameFontBase.toColorCode(r: Int, g: Int, b: Int) -- returns String
GameFontBase.toColorCode(r: Int, g: Int, b: Int, a: Int) -- returns String

rgba4444 takes whole RGBA as input, that is, from 0x0000 to 0xFFFF. Most significant bits represents Red, and least significant bits represents Alpha (which should be fixed as F for the most time) r, g, b(, a) takes RGB and A separately, in the range of 0x0..0xF. Any value exceeding the range are unchecked and may wreak havoc, so be careful.

U+100000 is used to disable previously-applied color codes (going back to original colour), although it may seem like RGBA of all zero.

Contribution guidelines

You can contribute to the font by fixing wrong glyphs, suggesting better ones, extending character set (letters for other writing systems or filling in the blanks on the existing ones), or code for other game frameworks (not limited to Java). Please leave pull request for that.

Font Spritesheets are stored in assets/graphics/fonts directory. Image format must be TGA with Alpha — no PNG. If someone needs PNG, they can batch-convert the font using utils like ImageMagick.

Ascenders, descenders, width informations

Above image is a reference you can use while you draw some letters. Capital B is drawn as a reference. Orange-tinted area is for lowercase, x-height must be the same as that of said tinted area (lowercase Alpha is also drawn for the reference). NOTE THAT x-height is taller than centre bar (capital A is an exception). Height of the ascender of the lowercase letters must be the same as height of capital letters.

Red-tinted area SHOULD NOT CONTAIN any dots, it's emptied for compatibility. (Slick2d—you can define size of "gaps" of the spritesheet, but you can't define horizontal and vertical gap separately)

Blue-tinted area cotains width of the glyph in binary, uppermost dot is the Least Significant Bit.

Green-tinted area contains extra informations, left blank for most cases. (will be expanded later; no standard has been issued yet)

Tinted-in-magenta shows the height where diacritics should be placed, for both uppercase and lowercase.

Each cell is 16 px wide, and any glyph you draw must be contained within leftside FIFTEEN pixels.

Font metrics

Although the font is basically a Spritesheet, some of the sheet expects variable widths to be supported. Any sheets with _variable means it expects variable widths. Anything else expects fixed width (regular Spritesheet behaviour). cjkpunct has width of 10, kana and hangul_johab has width of 12, wenquanyi has width of 16.

Parsing glyph widths for variable font sheets

Width is encoded in binary bits, on pixels. On the font spritesheet, every glyph has vertical dots on their top-right side (to be exact, every (16k - 1)th pixel on x axis). Above image is a sample of the font, with width information coloured in magenta. From top to bottom, each dot represents 1, 2, 4 and 8. For example, in the above image, ! (exclamation mark) has width of 5, " (double quote) has width of 6, # (octothorp) has width of 8, $ (dollar sign) has width of 9.

Implementing the Korean writing system

On this font, Hangul letters are printed by assemblying two or three letter pieces. There are 10 sets of Hangul letter pieces on the font. Top 6 are initials, middle 2 are medials, and bottom 2 are finals. On the rightmost side, there's eight assembled glyphs to help you with (assuming you have basic knowledge on the writing system). Top 6 tells you how to use 6 initials, and bottom 2 tells you how to use 2 finals.

This is a Kotlin-like pseudocode for assembling the glyph:

function getHanChosung(hanIndex: Int) = hanIndex / (21 * 28)
function getHanJungseong(hanIndex: Int) = hanIndex / 28 % 21
function getHanJongseong(hanIndex: Int) = hanIndex % 28

jungseongWide = arrayOf(8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 21)
jungseongComplex = arrayOf(9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 22)

function getHanInitialRow(hanIndex: Int): Int {
    val ret: Int

    if (isJungseongWide(hanIndex))
        ret = 2
    else if (isJungseongComplex(hanIndex))
        ret = 4
    else
        ret = 0

    return if (getHanJongseong(hanIndex) == 0) ret else ret + 1
}

function isJungseongWide(hanIndex: Int) = jungseongWide.contains(getHanJungseong(hanIndex))
function isJungseongComplex(hanIndex: Int) = jungseongComplex.contains(getHanJungseong(hanIndex))

function getHanInitialRow(hanIndex: Int): Int {
    val ret: Int

    if (isJungseongWide(hanIndex))
        ret = 2
    else if (isJungseongComplex(hanIndex))
        ret = 4
    else
        ret = 0

    return if (getHanJongseong(hanIndex) == 0) ret else ret + 1
}

function getHanMedialRow(hanIndex: Int) = if (getHanJongseong(hanIndex) == 0) 6 else 7

function getHanFinalRow(hanIndex: Int): Int {
    val jungseongIndex = getHanJungseong(hanIndex)

    return if (jungseongWide.contains(jungseongIndex))
        8
    else
        9
}

function isHangul(c: Char) = c.toInt() >= 0xAC00 && c.toInt() < 0xD7A4

...

for (each Char on the string) {
    if (isHangul(Char)) {
        val hIndex = Char.toInt() - 0xAC00

        val indexCho = getHanChosung(hIndex)
        val indexJung = getHanJungseong(hIndex)
        val indexJong = getHanJongseong(hIndex)

        val choRow = getHanInitialRow(hIndex)
        val jungRow = getHanMedialRow(hIndex)
        val jongRow = getHanFinalRow(hIndex)

        // get sub image from sprite sheet
        val choseongImage =  hangulSheet.getSubImage(indexCho, choRow)
        val jungseongImage = hangulSheet.getSubImage(indexJung, jungRow)
        val jongseongImage = hangulSheet.getSubImage(indexJong, jongRow)
        
        // actual drawing part
        draw choseongImage to somewhere you want
        draw jungseongImage on top of choseongImage
        draw jongseongImage on top of choseongImage
    }
    ...
}

Acknowledgement

Thanks to kind people of /r/Typography for amazing feedbacks.

CJK Ideographs are powered by WenQuanYi Font. The font is distributed under the GNU GPL version 2. Although the glyphs themselves are not copyrightable (the program codes—e.g. TTF—do), we would like to give a credit for the font and the people behind it.