Detailed information on usage and creating your own fonts.
- Works like a sprite font
- Scaling without losing quality
- Great performance
- Outline and glow
- Kerning and text boxes
Distance field fonts are very similar to sprite fonts. Both are drawn using a single textured quad per character. A distance field image is used instead of a texture to keep quality high even when scaled. Using distance fields should feel familiar, there's no extra hoops to jump through -- no need to render to a texture first or anything.
| Scaled down | Scaled up |
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Add DistanceField.dll as a reference to Monogame pipeline tool, and to your Monogame project. Import a BMFont file with the pipeline tool and load it like any other resource. The BMFont file should be in the same folder with a distance field image that has the same file name.
//Load like any other pipeline resource
Font font = Content.Load<Font>("Arial");
...
//Draw text
font.DrawString("Hello Monogame!", Color.Black, new Vector2(20, 20), 12);For more detailed information on usage, please see the documentation.
Instead of importing BMFont files and distance field images generated by an external tool, it would be great to able to import a TrueType/OpenType file and have the importer generate a distance field image and required metadata. This would make the project truly standalone. However getting that to work is quite involved.
The steps needed to create this type of importer:
- Loading glyph outlines from a .ttf/.otf file.
- Being able to actually render characters.
- Finding a font size that allows all characters to fit using square packing.
- Generating a distance field. Has to be done at a higher quality then scaled down.
Parsing font files and rendering glyphs can be outsourced to a library, but I have not been able to find a font library that does high quality distance field rendering as well.