⏭ Use TextraTypist Instead! ⏭

TextraTypist has all of the features from TextraMode and more. It is the continuation of the work in this library. The same author, plus contributors, wrote it and code is added to TextraTypist continually.

The code here is simpler, but TextraTypist has generally been bug-checked more thoroughly, and it has the same four core classes (Font, Layout, Line, and TextraLabel) that this library has. It also provides pre-configured fonts for easier use, in addition to the main big feature, "can act like typing-label."

textramode

Extra features for fonts in libGDX. (ARCHIVED)

But what kind of extra features?

Textramode is a small, new library that provides at least a glimpse of what text handling in libGDX could be like. It extends the color markup syntax used optionally in libGDX BitmapFonts, making it so on top of color markup like [RED] and [#66CCFF], you can use markup to declare bold, oblique/italic, underlined, struck-through, subscript, superscript, and "midscript" transforms (and combinations of most of those), and also capitalization changes (such as for generated text that should be ALL CAPS, lower case, or Capitalized Initially). We also support normal bitmap fonts, distance field fonts (also called SDF), and the newer, more-crisp MSDF fonts (multi-channel signed distance field fonts). This library has its own Fontclass, which is mostly unrelated to libGDX's BitmapFont class, and it offers several features BitmapFont doesn't. Font is partly a thin wrapper around an IntMap that maps each char (which can be treated as an int key here) to a TextureRegion. You can access each glyph's visual appearance as a type of TextureRegion, which is utterly frustrating to attempt with BitmapFont. The logic to actually draw the font is there too, and that's not thin at all! As an equivalent to libGDX's GlyphLayout, which is part of one of the most complicated heaps of code in all of libGDX, we have Layout, which is a rather simple collection of Lines, and of course that Line class (with just 34 lines of code).

So, how do I use it?

Most of the way Textramode works is based around building a Layout once and then drawing that same Layout every frame while it is visible. You usually fill up a Layout using methods in Font, which modifies its Layout parameter in most cases. Assembling a Font in the first place has several options available to you, including (for compatibility) using an existing libGDX BitmapFont to copy as a basis. You can specify the Font.DistanceFieldType if you use something other than the most minimal constructors; the default is STANDARD for a normal bitmap font, and you can also use SDF or MSDF if you have an appropriate font (you can use some predefined ones from the Glamer repo as a starting point). There are also several pre-made fonts in the test resources here. Frequently, because of the imprecise nature of bitmap fonts, you may need to adjust the x, y, width, and height modifiers of the font to account for padding. As an example, if you use Gentium.fnt from this repo, then it works well with -1f, 0f, -4.5f, 0f for those four modifiers, but most fonts need manual adjustment to get the distances between chars right.

Once you have a Font myFont and an empty Layout myLayout, you can just call myFont.markup("Some string with [/]markup[/]!", myLayout);, which will fill up myLayout with the needed info to draw the mix of normal and oblique text in myFont. myFont.drawGlyphs(myBatch, myLayout, x, y); is usually all that's needed in render() to draw that Layout.

What about that markup?

The style effects you can apply to text are probably the main feature for this library right now, and they can all be enabled by markup. The markup uses the same basic syntax as color markup in libGDX, but it doesn't interact at all with the (somewhat-unreliable) color markup code in libGDX. Markup starts and ends with square brackets, with the first character inside the square brackets having special meaning if it is not a letter. You can use [[ to escape a left bracket, there's no need to escape right brackets, and [] has the special meaning of resetting all color, style, and case formatting. Beyond these, there are quite a few kinds:

[*] toggles bold mode.
[/] toggles oblique mode (like italics).
[^] toggles superscript mode (and turns off subscript or midscript mode).
[=] toggles midscript mode (and turns off superscript or subscript mode).
[.] toggles subscript mode (and turns off superscript or midscript mode).
[_] toggles underline mode.
[~] toggles strikethrough mode.
[!] toggles all upper case mode (replacing any other case mode).
[,] toggles all lower case mode (replacing any other case mode).
[;] toggles capitalize each word mode (replacing any other case mode).
[#HHHHHHHH], where HHHHHHHH is a hex RGB888 or RGBA8888 int color, changes the color.
[COLORNAME], where COLORNAME is a typically-upper-case color name that will be looked up in libGDX's Colors class, changes the color.
- The name can optionally be preceded by |, which allows looking up colors with names that contain punctuation. For example, [|;_;] would look up a color called ;_;, and would not act like [;].

Most of these modes are compatible with each other. The exceptions are the super/sub/mid-script modes, where only one of those three can be enabled at a time, and the case modes, where only one of those three can be enabled at a time. You can have bold+oblique+underline+strikethrough+subscript+capitalize modes all enabled at once, in addition to a color. Note that almost all of these toggle a mode, so if you start bold mode with [*], you can turn it off with the next [*]. You can also turn off all modes with [].

How do I get it?

JitPack! You can use the JitPack repository to get a release or recent commit. There's also some releases here, in the Releases page in the sidebar.