Implementing Fonts, User Interfaces, and Localization - Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials - page 165

Here are the basic steps needed to generate a font resource:
1. Start the Marmalade Studio - Font Builder utility. You can find a Windows
Start button menu shortcut for it under Marmalade | x.x | Tools , where x.x
represents the version number of the Marmalade SDK you have installed.
2. In the top-left panel labeled Input , first click on the Select… button to
display a font selection dialog. Choose the font, size, and style you require
and click on OK . You can choose any installed Windows font, whether it be
a scalable TrueType font or a fixed-size bitmapped font.
3. The Characters textbox allows you to specify a list of the characters you
require in your font. A default selection covering most European languages
is present, but you can add or remove as many characters as you want. Fewer
characters is obviously better though, as it will reduce the size of the bitmap
that gets generated and thus take up less memory. It is also possible to
populate this textbox by loading a text file using File | Load Character Map .
The Characters textbox will then contain every unique character present in
the text file, minus formatting characters such as tabs or newlines.
4. Moving on to the section labeled Output Options , you can choose a color
for the font using the numeric entry boxes or by clicking on the Select…
button to display a color selection dialog. It is recommended that you keep
the color set to the default of bright white as the text color can then easily be
set at runtime.
5. There are also some other settings here that allow you to adjust the look of
the font. There are checkboxes to force all characters to be in capitals and to
enable the addition of a drop shadow to the font. If this checkbox is ticked,
a textbox allows the pixel offset of the drop shadow to be specified.
6. Next, look at the top right panel labeled Output . Here we can see a preview
of what the generated font characters will look like. Just click on the Redraw
button and after a short delay the characters will appear in the view area.
You can then use the two sets of Prev and Next buttons to cycle through each
character.
7. We're nearly ready to export the font; but before we can, we need to specify
where we want the font files to be created, which is done in the Saving and
Loading panel. Click on the Browse… button to display a file requester to
choose the required directory or enter it directly into the Save Path textbox.
The last part of this filename is the base filename that will be used to export
the font data.
8. To create the font files, ensure that the two checkboxes labeled Save .TGA
and Save .gxfont are checked, then click on the Create button.