Been struggling to find an easy to use tool/plugin that converts a font into a bitmap that can be loaded into the game engine.
Wanting to use bitmap text as the font objects are a pain to deal with.
Create a script in bpy that places characters and then renders them (or converts them to a mesh if you want vector text). I started doing this the other day, but then decided I’d rather fix BGE’s font objects (which internally render the text to bitmap for you) if I ran into issues with them.
There was a script called ptblender that converts ttf fonts into BGE usable bitmap font textures (not to be confused with text objects).
So turns out they removed bitmaps from UPBGE all together, and they no longer appear to work properly in 2.78c
I guess this solves the issue that UTF-8 characters are not properly shown since 2.5 ;).
So turns out they removed bitmaps from UPBGE all together, and they no longer appear to work properly in 2.78c
No bitmap fonts in UPBGE, but in 2.78c they work even better than in 2.49b 
Strange, when I tried it the correct number of symbols showed but they were all the same starting symbol.
Perhaps I exported the font incorrectly.
Perhaps I exported the font incorrectly.
AFAIK There is data encoded in the top row of pixels that tells it character position/size. I’ve never really had any luck with exporting my own fonts for use with blender’s native bitmap font system.
+1 on ptblender, I used that a long time ago, to make fonts. I’m learning how to use the text object instead, now. Oops, correction, it was ftblender for 2.49. Can you let us know what you find?
FWIW. . . I used an old version of FTBlend in 2.49 to make text.TGA. Then appended them into newer versions of blender. It worked fine in most versions that support it.