Font Manager

A bit of the Corona Simulator

The font library is starting to produce some results.

First thing I did was to write a lua script which converts the .fnt file that programs like bmGlyph produce to a lua file, so that I can require it rather than parsing it all the time.

Then I wrote a BitmapFont class which reads and stores the bitmap information, and creates image objects that can be manipulated.

This picture (from the repository https://github.com/autismuk/Font-Manager) shows the sort of thing I'm hoping to do, though this is the testing code that the BitmapFont class uses (the reason for the 'y' is to check descenders), and it doesn't show the animation, which is a bit eye-numbing :)

Basically it operates like a text item, except every character is a display object. They can be aligned horizontally or at any angle you like. There is an overall scale, horizontal and vertical (-ve flips individual letters not the whole thing). Letters can independently rotate (the 'O' of world is going in the other direction if you look closely).

Once you've done that though, additional to the standard scale and position you can apply individual scales and positions. You can see that the 'e' is scaled up and the 'w' is scaled down.  Also, the whole string has a sine curve applied to it that makes it wavy.  In the demo in the repository at the moment, these things are all being animated using enterFrame, so they are all spinning, and the 'e' and 'w' are zooming in and out.

The modifiers will be encapsulated in a function call which includes the character position and the clock, so you can either have static effects (the sine shaping) or active effects (the zooming and rotating).

At the moment it is just done by testing code, I wanted to make sure the code to position/scale/rotate the characters was pretty bulletproof first.

If you removed all these modifiers it would just display "Hello, worldy !" in a straight line neatly in the bounding box.

Besides this, while it will be an OOP library it is possible to access the view group, so that you can apply transitions to it, though only as a whole thing, the transition.to/from methods won't work on individual characters.

It's not actually useable as a library - yet - but it is available to download if anyone wants to look and/or make suggestions.