Tips & Tricks

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Cliff Owen

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Nov 21, 2010, 12:12:41 PM11/21/10
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I recently discovered something that I’m quite happy about and I thought I’d share it. It’s FontForge.

FontForge is a free tool that lets you edit fonts. Yeah, ok.. “So What?” you say. Well Unity builds your fonts into textures. The amount of space required is based on the number of glyphs in the font and the size of your import.

If you’re like me, you localize your game.. At least a little bit. This means you’re using Unicode and some fonts contain a lot more characters than you’re actually using in your game.

I recently found this great font and it contained all my European characters + a bunch of Japanese and Korean characters. When loaded in A8 format the size was 2048x1024.. 2 meg hit. Of course, the iPod Touch doesn’t like a texture that big, so it shrinks it down to 1024x512 in memory and the font looks horrible.

Enter FontForge: Cut out all those characters like []/%$&^” + Japanese characters and stuff I’m not using and Tada: 512x256. 128k total, the device can hold it’s at full resolution so it looks great on old devices and I still have everything I need for localizing the game in all the languages I care about.

Really, if your game contains “Score: 1234567890”, why do you need xyzpdq taking up space?

There’s quite a few font editors out there, but if you just want to shave a character out here or there, you don’t need anything beyond this free utility. But the real point of my message: Don’t go thinking that just because you have a font and Unity doesn’t let you specify the characters you’re going to use that you’re stuck with what you have.

Cheers
Cliff

John Grden

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Nov 21, 2010, 5:20:09 PM11/21/10
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Dood that rocks \m/ thanks for sharing Cliff!

Sent from my iPad
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