I've written a quick'n'dirty Bitmap font converter utility so that I can quickly create bitmap fonts in The Gimp and then convert them to a set of files to include in CEGUI:
* a square (2^n) image file
* a CEGUI .font file
* a CEGUI .imageset file
* an Ogre .fontdef file (so you can use the same font directly in Ogre’s engine)
I’ve posted about this already in Ogre’s forum at: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19910
Basically you feed it an image with your font characters in a horizontal line with some vertical alpha strips between each character, and it creates the four above files for you.
So you create this (I’ve cut off the end of this image so that it doesn’t mess with the width of this page):
And it gives you your font definition files (.font + .imageset) along with:
It’s still a bit dodgey as it doesn’t automatically calculate the best dimensions of the output image file, although it wouldn’t be all that much to add.
If anyone has a recommended place I can upload the utility I’m happy to put it and its source up on the internet. I’ve started writing up some doco on how to knock up a quick font in The Gimp for import into this utility and I’ll put these on the Wiki if there’s any interest. It really is quite quick to create a nice looking font this way.
It’s dependent on the DevIL image library and I’ve only tried to compile it under Windows. It's a command line utility.
Cheers.