royalty free fonts vs creating fonts for iOS app

If the font is completely free (not free for personal use, but completely free), then you can use it how you want and for however long you want, and you can embed it in your app. Some fonts might have a license where you're able to render some visuals with the font but can't embed the full typeface in your app.

 

BTW - I'm using GlyphDesigner ($29.99) in my game to customize/"pimp" (free) font - the results are amazing!
(maybe the app isn't cheap but it is worth it)

-=Agnes=-

 

I look for fonts on dafont.com because they are very clear on what restrictions there are on use. Often they will have a file in the download that states the exact terms. I wouldn't use a font with anything less.

Having said that, I am working on my own font for future projects. That will give me exactly what I want (or as near as I can get with my ability). If you are capable of making your own font, and have the time to do it, then go for it.

 

This tool looks really cool. Since you're using it, maybe you can answer a quick question. Basically, how well/easy does it handle generating font glyphs for different languages that may be used in a game? Specifically, I might have some files defining the localized strings for each language. I'd want a way to "feed" in those files to this tool so that it can add the right glyphs to the texture, based on what's in the localization files. Does the tool have an easy (command line?) way to do this?

Thnx!

 

How is $29.99 not cheap? It's practically free. Compare it to the hourly rate of a typical programmer and then look at the results you get. It's really underpriced in my opinion.

 

Glyph Designer lets you decide what characters go into each generated bitmap font.

You can create one font for English, one for French, etc.

As long as your font has the glyph and you know what to type to get that glyph to show up in a standard edit box (or you can copy/paste it), then you can add the character to the bitmap font.

I haven't looked into using it from the command line, but if you have your own command line tool that dumps out the string(s) you need, you can paste the string into Glyph Designer.

 

As MindJuice wrote it's very easy - there is a edit box named "Included Glyphs" and the simple copy & paste mechanism (+click on Update button ) solves the issue

Hmmm... $29.99 can be a lot of money for some guys like IndieDev or for those who have to take into consideration rate of exchange (like USD vs. PLN)

-=Agnes=-

 

I saw that you can manually add individual glyphs in that little edit box in one of their videos. That's ok, but not really useful if what I have is text files with localized text. It needs to have some way to automatically read a text file and get the needed glyphs out of it.

Is it possible to select-all in a text file, and then copy-paste into the edit box? That would be somewhat usable, although really it needs a way to automate this type of work through the command-line.

One other problem I noticed is that this program is only available for Mac, no Windows version. That's a somewhat major issue.

 

I wouldn't use a font with anything less.