TextField and BMFont Discussion

Nascode

Hello everyone,

Currently i am using BMFont class from https://github.com/gideros/BMFont to display text. What is good from it is i could use software like GlyphDesigner or bmGlyph to stylize my font and export well-known angelcode (.fnt) format. There is some knowledge i learn about using it compared with TextField (non TTF font):

1. Comparing with TextField, i have test with many characters, ~3500 chars. And TextField performing a lot better than BMFont. Native classess sure got optimized heavily.
2. Internationalization support in TextField is better, since you need not handle reading bytes of unicode string. I have found solution to add internationalization support to BMFont from reading LPeg's manual http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ (unicode handling part)
3. In term of handling text per-character, because BMFont is simply a sprite container with many child sprites, BMFont is better is you want more eye-candy, such as GTweening each character.
4. TextField is generally more supported with nice classess such as TextWrap by @ar2rsawseen

In summary:
Use TextField if you want performance with long text. And use BMFont if you want eye candy and control. Consider TextField for text heavy games, such as RPG or Visual Novel

Gideros Font Creator is rather primitive and is not built to stylize font. To stylize it you could edit the png image of font, which is rather cumbersome. The exported text format is weird and i have not found description of it. Where can i find the description, maybe i could create a parser from .fnt to Gideros Font's format?

My suggestion is adding option to add .fnt support to TextField, so we will have a winner