The topic about “PopCap's font system” made me curious about what everyone is doing for fonts. We used to have the artists put a font into one big image. He could paint the image, render it in 3D, or whatever. We used the bottom row of pixels to specify the character boundaries. A white dot in the bottom row indicated the break between two characters and the bottom row was never drawn to the game screen. But we found that usually the artists made the fonts images by finding (or making) a True Type font they liked and then typing all the characters into a text document and taking a screen shot of that. We also ran into a problem when we needed to do international versions of the game. There were WAY to many characters. Now we just use True Type fonts. The artists can edit the fonts in a standard True Type font editor or we can just use free True Type font without going through any special tools or converters. We don’t let Windows render the True Type for a number of reasons. Different version of Windows render them differently especially in regard to antialiasing, it is cumbersome to “install” the True Type fonts, and not all platforms are Windows! We use FreeType which is a free cross-platform library to rasterize the True Type characters and then we push that bit map through our standard 2D blitter stuff.

So how is everyone else doing fonts these days? There is probably some old thread in the archive I should have read first.