After some gentle prodding by the community (and frankly I was thinking about it anyway, dangit!) I cleaned up my source code a bit and now GamefontMaker is Open Source under the GNU GPLv2.

Latest build of GameFontMaker: GamefontMaker v1.0.0 Beta 2 (This probably requires OS X 10.6, but I have not tested earlier versions)

Latest GameFontMaker Source Code: GamefontMaker v1.0.0 Beta 2

GamefontMaker is a native OS X utility designed to export fonts into a bitmapped format for iOS and other games. The reason for creating it, at least for me, was to replace a much more clunky and hard to use tool I had made earlier. As well, it was a great way to learn how to write OS X Cocoa apps :)

There is another nice font making tool available, but it is Windows only so it's kind of inconvenient for iOS developers who don't have access to a Windows machine so I decided to share my work to help everyone out.

How to use GamefontMaker

Using GamefontMaker is fairly simple. Just select the font you want to use by clicking the "Fonts" button in the tool bar, then hit "Export Font" and it will ask for a filename. It will automatically assume a .png extension. Once you click Save, it will export the printable ASCII characters in the font to a PNG file with all of the characters on one line. If you check "Create power-of-two texture" GFM will try and find the smallest power of two texture that your font will fit into.

As well, it produces an XML file that describes the position and size of each character (position is based on the lower left hand corner of the PNG):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<fontdata>
	<glyph>
		<character> </character>
		<width>7</width>
		<height>25</height>
		<xoffset>0</xoffset>
		<yoffset>0</yoffset>
	</glyph>
...
</fontdata>

If you find GamefontMaker useful, you could always check out my games or click the little button below this and follow me on Twitter :)