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0 A.D. Font Builder 

====================



The Font Builder generates pre-rendered font glyphs for use in the game engine. Its output for each font consists

of an 8-bit greyscale PNG image and a descriptor .fnt file that describes and locates each individual glyph in the image

(see fileformat.txt for details).



See the wiki page for more information:



    http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Font_Builder2



Prerequisites

-------------



The main prerequisite for the fontbuilder is the Cairo imaging library and its Python bindings, PyCairo. On most

Linux distributions, this should be merely a matter of installing a package (e.g. 'python-cairo' for Debian/Ubuntu),

but on Windows it's more involved.



We'll demonstrate the process for Windows 32-bit first. Grab a Win32 binary for PyCairo from

     

     http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/pycairo/1.8/



and install it using the installer. There are installers available for Python versions 2.6 and 2.7. The installer

extracts the necessary files into Lib\site-packages\cairo within your Python installation directory.



Next is Cairo itself, and some dependencies which are required for Cairo to work. Head to

   

    http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/dependencies/



and get the following binaries. Listed next to each are their version numbers at the time of writing; these may vary

over time, so be adaptive!

    

    - Cairo (cairo_1.8.10-3_win32.zip)

    - Fontconfig (fontconfig_2.8.0-2_win32.zip)

    - Freetype (freetype_2.4.4-1_win32.zip)

    - Expat (expat_2.0.1-1_win32.zip)

    - libpng (libpng_1.4.3-1_win32.zip)

    - zlib (zlib_1.2.5-2_win32.zip).



Each ZIP file will contain a bin subfolder with a DLL file in it. Put the following DLLs in Lib\site-packages\cairo

within your Python installation:

    

    libcairo-2.dll (from cairo_1.8.10-3_win32.zip)

    libfontconfig-1.dll (from fontconfig_2.8.0-2_win32.zip)

    freetype6.dll (from freetype_2.4.4-1_win32.zip)

    libexpat-1.dll (from expat_2.0.1-1_win32.zip)

    libpng14-14.dll (from libpng_1.4.3-1_win32.zip)

    zlib1.dll (from zlib_1.2.5-2_win32.zip).



You should be all set now. To test whether PyCairo installed successfully, try running the following command on a 

command line:



python -c "import cairo"



If it doesn't complain, then it's installed successfully.



On Windows 64-bit, the process is similar, but no pre-built PyCairo executable appears to be available from Gnome at

the time of writing. Instead, you can install PyGTK+ for 64-bit Windows, which includes Cairo, PyCairo, and the

same set of dependencies. See this page for details:



    http://www.pygtk.org/downloads.html



Running

-------



Running the font-builder is fairly straight-forward; there are no configuration options. One caveat is that you must

run it from its own directory as the current directory.



    python fontbuilder.py



This will generate the output .png and .fnt files straight into the binaries/data/mods/public/fonts directory, ready

for in-game use.