Hey everyone ? I found this on my hard drive… If anyone would like to
put in a more permant place that would be cool of ya 
here it is
What is ftBlender?
It’s a tool to convert true type fonts (.TTF files) into .tga images, which can be used as text in the game engine.
Not all fonts work properly, but it’s a good tool for using custom fonts in a game. Here’s an example output (converted from .tga):
Cool! How do I use ftblender?
no! not again!
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19821&highlight=ftblender
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19715&highlight=ftblender
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19486&highlight=ftblender
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16684&highlight=ftblender
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7844&highlight=ftblender
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7946&highlight=ftblender
it is mentioned in the FAQ too
Forget it. It just gave me a headache trying to use it. Can you give me a font pic please?
Edit: Andy83, can I use that font?
I got this running from the command line after looking at some of the links here on elysiun that z3rod put up. But when I try to run the blend I get
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “ftblender_batch.py”, line 33, in ?
File “C:\PYTHON23\LIB\os.py”, line 282
yield top, dirs, nondirs
^
Any Ideas
Thats weird… it works for me with python 2.3.4 & blender 2.33
do you have the fonts in the same dir as the blend?
MUCH easier to use is a program called Bitmap Font Builder.
I used this on an Old English style font I downloaded and it gave me what LOOKS like a correct tga bitmap. I followed the instructions at the blender site about using text in the game engine and did get “something” on the plane I used. But it did not look like text. One thing MUST the tga or image file have the letters in a certain row column order? That tutorial at blender.org says the to put the uv box around the @ symbol well this font did not have and @ symbol. So I tried just a the upper right corner of the tga. In the same size as the rest of the characters. That area on the tga was all black. Well I came out with a solid black plane. Ok then I tried to put the uv box on the first capital letter A that I saw. That maked the plane look like a jumble of overlapping As. Yes I did have a “Text” property set for the plane. Yes I did have a string value typed in the property box.
Am I missing something?
usually the @ sign [there may be two] is at the upper left
[and you need to mark text on that face, and give the object a property named Text, but I think you knew that]
can you upload the image it created for us to try?
usually the @ sign [there may be two] is at the upper left
[and you need to mark text on that face, and give the object a property named Text, but I think you knew that]
can you upload the image it created for us to try?[/quote]
Here is the font after it was converted using the Bitmap Font builder. I converted this to a jpg in order to upload it to this web host. I used a .tga file in the game engine.
If this image the next one does not show up here in this post you can reach them by directly copying and pasting the following urls in your browser address bar.
http://vrconstruction.agreatserver.com/Oldengl2.jpg
http://vrconstruction.agreatserver.com/Frontscreenfont.jpg
I seem to be having some problems with this new webhost.
Here is how it shows up on my screen when I try to put in it the game engine on a plane.
I think its missing the header
Which “header”?
Which “header”?[/quote]
if you look at the images that ftblender outputs it has a bunch of black and white garbage at the top. this should be there, it probably specifies which caracters are on the texture, and where, but it does also specify the size of the characters allowing non-monospace fonts
Ok back to using ftblender.blend instead of Bitmap Font Builder. When I run the blend file using Blender 2.25 with a seperated install of python2.3 ( I used that version becasue I also have Blender 2.33a installed) I get this error.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “ftblender_batch.py”, line 33, in ?
File “C:\PYTHON23\LIB\os.py”, line 282
yield top, dirs, nondirs
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
I SUSPECT that this is due to using python 2.3 can anyone look at the script window in this file and tell me how to correct it?
I got it working perfectly fine in blender 2.33 with the current python…
Have you tried runing ftblender from the command line? because thats all
the python script in the .blend is doing.
Here is the a font that I tried to convert to use in the with ftblender.
Just copy and past the link if it does not automagically come up from elysiun.
http://vrconstruction.agreatserver.com/OLDBKLTR.jpg
It come out as just a set of white squares. This font shows up just fine on my system.
You can’t use some fonts. I guess that’s one of them. Are you sure it was a .TTF font?