OK I am trying to make my own font for use in blender, I made a .tga image with all the characters in the right order, problems;
Blender wont read tga files made in gimp which contain an alpha chanel (white plane of death).
blender wont use the Text property to assign anything but @@@@@@@ no matter what I type because there appears to be some sort of header information that tells blender where to look in the image for each character and that header is not automatically written to tga files.
I found ftblender which automatically converts .ttf font files to a blender compatible tga with the correct header.
I searched for a TTF editor which has pixel support, I found nothing only curve and vector based glyph outliners (which really suck from an artistic perspective) especially seeing as I already have the pixels done. it seems incredibly odd that all ttf editors use curves and vectors to outline a shape seeing as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType
“The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font sizes.”
Many people have told me that ttf is a vector format. IT IS NOT, it was originally based on type 1 bitmaps supporting only 2 colors background and glyph (alpha and black).
anyways, there seems to be no way for me to get from point A to point B here
point A: develop my own customly designed glyph shapes BY PIXEL.
point B: use them in blender as a UV font. help would be appreciated
How can you help me?
1: supply the rules of the header text that is necessary for blender to read glyph locations from a TGA file.
2: Supply a working link to a pixel based TTF editor.
3: supply fix for The GIMP’s TGA Alpha channel read gitch in blender.
any of these will get me from A to B.