What is Glyph Combiner ?

Glyph Combiner is the essential companion to Glyph Designer (GD) when working with Bitmapped Fonts.

It improves PERFORMANCE... and simplifies WORKFLOW ...

... by combining multiple bitmapped font output files from GD into a single image file and respective meta files.

The single image loads faster and avoids needless texture re-binding when rendering.

How does it work ?

The workflow is simple:-

Craft with - Glyph Designer (GD) - to create beautiful bitmapped fonts for your projects.

Tune with - Glyph Combiner (GC) - to combine & select only the fonts you need for your current project.

This results in fewer textures to swap between at runtime - boosting performance !

NOTE: GC also works with - BMFont, bmGlyph, and Hiero, or other AngelCode formatted output.

OPTIMIZE

GC allows last minute optimization of the Glyph Sheet - allowing selection of the exact glyphs required from each input sheet.

"If you only need Letter and Number Glyphs, delete the rest.

"Only need UPPERCASE glyphs, delete the rest."

By optimizing the glyphs included, this allows more relevant glyphs to fit on a single sheet, reducing the size of the sheet in texture memory.

PERFORMANCE

Hit 60 FPS performance by avoiding glBindTexture(..) calls when switching fonts. GC combines many fonts into a single image texture. This simplifies WORKFLOW and boosts PERFORMANCE

Keywords

Keywords allows you to only include the Glyphs that you need.

Just add the words you need in your project, and GlyphCombiner will exclude any unused glyphs !

It's a kind of Ref-counting ...

Panel Views

Familiar collapsible panel views allow un-needed controls to be hidden, and promote focus and simplicity.

Control panels on the Left, Right and Bottom of the User Interface may be hidden as needed.

Inspectors

Glyph Info

Displays details of a given Glyph, including dimensions, identifier, position, and number of applicable kernings.

It also allows direct navigation of Next/Previous glyphs.
Sheet Info

Permits adjustment of the Sheet dimensions, with automatic and manual "2-to-the-N" sizing available.

Selection of the packing algorithm of either per glyph or per sheet may be selected.
Kernings

The Kernings inspector allows navigation of the kernings to be applied to pairs of glyphs. This typographical property allows for cleaner flow of text, and should be present in the TrueType font source.

Tweaks and adjustment of the individual kerning values may be made here.
Keywords

A powerful feature that permits selection of only the Glyphs used in the text entered as "keywords".

Glyphs get reference counted such that Glyphs "in-use" are preserved for inclusion, all others may be deleted.

40 x Zoom

Easily zoom In, Out and to Fit using trackpad or mouse... smooth and silky.

Double check for the slightest flaw.

Repeat !

Kernings

Inspect and Edit individual Kernings as needed, tweaking glyph positions precisely.

Also useful information for debugging rendering issues

Simply double-click the Amount cells to edit the value.

1-Click Export

Export only the glyphs you need with a single click. Don’t worry the output is non-destructive to the Input sheets...

Select output format per sheet, and click the Export button.

The result is a single glyph sheet Image and new metadata files for the fonts included.

Simple and Space efficient !