Forums » Impact Engine » Suggestion: Font Tool to Support Borders

It would be great if the font tool could add an x-pixels-thick border to fonts. It is tedious adding them by hand and re-spacing the characters from one another.

Joncom: I'd love this feature as well!

Some additional effects like glow, drop-shadow (with alpha layer) would also be nice :) Any volunteers?

Glad to see I'm not the only one. This would be a great update to see with the next installment of Impact.

It would probably be better to come up with a plugin that could use a bitmap font in a different format. Seems to me there are several bitmap font tools out there and they probably output a font in some sort of "standard" way. These tools might have more ways to enhance the fonts and the format might be better to facilitate that.

Personally I've just manually created my own fonts in photoshop to use with impact.

I do it the way @Graphicos does it. I have a pretty large directory of different font's I've created in photoshop with different colors, borders, sizes, etc.

Do you think it'd be valuable to have a more "pluggable" font tool?

Here&039;s how I think it could work: there's a new file at the root of the game, #font-tool.html. You put some plugins in /lib/font-tool/plugins. Each plugin adds UI elements to parametrize itself. Each plugin can manipulate the underlying canvas to do whatever you want.

I have it mostly working, just have to hammer out the plugin draw order problem. You could have a "glow" plugin that draws earlier than the base font and adjusts the spacing to account for glowing. You could have a stroke plugin that draws a better outline of the letters on top of the base.

Made a plugin to add borders on the fly.