I've been working on a game for a while now and while I love truetype fonts, I would like to be able to have a font with a black outline around it. This would be nice to use against a graphic background so the characters stand out and are easier to read. Does anyone have any ideas on how this could be done without creating a bitmap font? I have created an Allegro 4 style bitmap font that works well, but I would prefer it if I could load in any font and not be limited on which characters I can use so I could use accented characters etc.

Here's the A4 style font (Verdana 12, bold) I created so you can see what I mean (feel free to use this if you wish, it looks nice):

{"name":"608260","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/8\/b87fe08bc1bbcd554ab0b933ca0b3aab.png","w":545,"h":146,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/8\/b87fe08bc1bbcd554ab0b933ca0b3aab"}

There was a patch for A5 at some point, not sure why it never made it into the api https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/611384

Looks like Trent seen some problems with that patch and wanted to go over it first, which I understand. It would be a very nice addition to be sure!

In the meantime, the way I made this was I used a normal bitmap font creation program, the type that makes bitmap fonts 256x256 or 512x512 etc... for use with 3D software. I generated a font without a grid, I set the generator to put a 3 pixel empty border around the font (not the grid, just empty space to make room for the outline). Then I generated a font WITH a yellow grid, only I set the font colour to the same as the background so you couldn't see the font and saved it. So now I have two bitmaps, one is the font, one is a grid for it. I loaded them into photoshop (or you use GIMP etc) and each bitmap in a layer. On photoshop you just go to blender options and use the STOKE, make it black. In this case I made it 3 pixels wide.

I then manually edited each character to fill in the horizontal space. It's a lot of work, but I couldn't think of an easier way of doing it.

I am tempted to try my hand at making my own outline font generator.

One of my major complaints about movie subtitles is that they end up blending with the background. Outlined fonts would sure be nice in allegro. Apparently it is possible with freetype to do so. Aaron Bolyard has done it.

There was another thread around here but I can't find it, with another patch by someone else that also didn't get included. This looks interesting, but wasn't what I was looking for.

Your Aaron link is not working for me.

That's because I'm daft. Fixed.
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/606076/898622#target

You might be able to pull this off with Pixel Shaders, though a simpler option is to have two different True Type fonts: One that represents the white part, and one that represents the black part. Then, every time you draw text to the screen, you first draw all the solid-filled outlines, then draw all the inner parts overtop.

Your simpler option probably won't look so good, as if the background font is expanded or loaded in a larger size then it will also spread out horizontally, ruining the alignment with the text on top in the smaller font. Not sure how much work it would take to create your own true type font for an outline for another font.

Ultimately though, it's bad practice to rely on an end-user to have a particular TrueType font already, and it's usually illegal to distribute the ones you may already have, depending on the licensing of each specific font you want to use. To that end, I've avoided TTF like the plague and always make my own bitmapped fonts.

There's lots of nice free to use fonts, for example Google offers 1000ds of completely free open source fonts. ^[1]

Elias, your link only shows a blank page. I assume that's not normal?

Needs JavaScript.

Huh. I've got most javascript enabled, but it shows a blank page. The only javascript disabled on my browser is context menu and status bar changes.

It works fine here.

...I still prefer to make my own fonts for my games.

Own fonts are hard if you want to translate your game.

That is my main concern. I would like to translate my game into different languages in the future and so I am designing it with that in mind. So, while this bitmap font I created works okay with English, it won't with other languages so an Allegro option would be much appreciated.

In java you can enumerate system fonts. Kinda handy.