tonc 1.4 preview

I'm close to releasing the latest (and probably last; this really has gone on long enough) version of Tonc. As a preview, I'm releasing the PDF a little early in the hope that someone may take a look and offer some feedback before the official release (aw, c'mon, it's only 400 pages).

The changes mostly relate to the new Tonc Text Engine, a text system for all occasions. There's a new chapter describing how TTE works, how to write general character printers for (almost) for arbitrary sized fonts and every type of graphics, and a few other things. It's fairly long and could use sanity checking from someone else.

Also, many of the older demos now use TTE for their text as well. As a result they look cleaner and prettier, but it's possible there are some left-overs from older versions. So have at it.

Usenti 1.7.8 and TTE demo

One major and some smaller changes to usenti. The major one is that there is now a font exporter that can convert bitmaps to TTE-usable fonts. I'm not sure if it's final yet, but any later changes should be small. The text-tool has been altered to facilitate creation of fonts by adding an opaque mode, an align-to-grid option and proper clipboard support (so you should be able to just copy an ASCII table into it, at which point the font is practically made already).

Also, there are separate pasting modes: one that matches the colors to the current palette (potentially mixing up the colors) and a direct-pixel paste, regardless of colors. Thanks, gauauu, for finally making me do this. Secondly, Kawa's been badgering me (politely) about editing colors in raw hex rather than via RGB triplets. This can be found, for various bad reasons, under the Palette menu under ‘Advanced color edit’.

Both of these items have … interesting side effects. Through the former, you can replace colors of a given palette-entry by copy-all, swap and paste. The color-edit accepts multiple colors separated by white-space and, later on, by commas as well, meaning that accidentally it's now possible to take previously exported palettes and add them again. Yes, it's feep, but it's interesting, somewhat hidden and cheap feep, so that's alright. I'm thinking about adding something similar for the image itself as well (plus raw image imports), but only when I'm bored enough.


To show off the font exporter and the TTE system itself, there is a little demo of what it can do here. I'm still pondering over what it should and should not be able to do, but most of the things shown in the demo would be in the final version as well.


Oh, RE: that wordpress bug. A v2.3.1 has been released now with the fix. Interesting factoid: the error (#5088) was classified as “highestomgbbq”.