After some research, I have come across two or three applications that take fonts and convert them into handy-dandy .tga files that can be used for dynamic text situations. Unfortunately, they are all windows based. Since I haven’t looked around for a specific that fits the style of the game I’m working on yet, the perfect solution would probably be a site or thread that just hosts a variety of pre-made files with example text. But, failing that, is there an application that will work on a 32-bit intel mac?
Have you tried dafont.com? When viewing a specific category, you can input example text and it will show you how that text looks like using the fonts in that category.
In addition, there are a few font management apps for Mac that will allow you to input sample text. Two of which are:
Suitcase Fusion
Fontcase
FontMatrix (freeware): http://fontmatrix.net/
These all look like great options for exploring and choosing fonts. In the meantime I found this page: http://www.tutorialsforblender3d.com/GameDoc/Text/FontSheet_1.html that has a small selection of ready to go fonts. To clarify my original post, I can find fonts just fine, but how to I turn them into a format Blender can use? If, like in the above link, there are fonts ready to use, then that’s great. But most font sites will distribute fonts in a wide variety of formats, none of which are images that can be read for uv textures.
Well, if that seems to be the answer, then I am willing to go that route. I just wanted to check and make sure I wasn’t missing something first. Thanks for the help.
Try FontForge, complicated and a little arcane but does just about anything font related possible including outputting outline fonts as bitmaps. I use it to convert Mac Type 1 fonts for PC. Just remember that Mac Type 1 fonts use a resource fork that is unreadable on Windows or Linuxen. I use FontForge under X11 on an old G4.