Bitmap Font

Bitmaps fonts generated with the BMFont tool are a great alternative to using the built in SpriteFont in MonoGame. There are a couple of reasons you might want to do this, either SpriteFont's are not working out for you or you want to have more control over the fonts in your game.

The BitmapFont class in MonoGame.Extended is designed to be a drop in replacement for the SpriteFont class as much as possible. The goal is to take a .fnt file and texture generated with the BMFont tool and load it into our game just like any other content.

_bitmapFont = Content.Load<BitmapFont>("my-font");

Then render some text just like any other string.

_spriteBatch.Begin();
_spriteBatch.DrawString(_bitmapFont, "Hello World", new Vector2(100, 200), Color.Red);
_spriteBatch.End();

But before we can do that, we'll need to generate our bitmap font file.

Generating the font file with BMFont

If you haven’t already done so, download and install the BMFont tool.

BMFont tool

The main window of BMFont displays all of the characters of the font. You'll need to click and drag over the characters to highlight them in white, these are the characters that will be saved to the exported texture. Typically you will take all of the top half and ignore the bottom half, although, you may only want to take a smaller subset to reduce texture size requirements.

To choose a font click Options => Font Settings or hit the F key. You can pretty much choose whatever settings you like here.

BMFont tool

Close that dialog and make sure all your desired characters are highlighted in white.

Next click Options => Export Options or hit the T key. The important thing here is setting the file format to XML and getting the texture width and height right. It's preferable to fit the entire font on a single texture (although not required) and it can sometimes take a little tweaking.

I also recommend using PNG textures, 32 bit depth and the White text with alpha preset, but it's up to you. Play around with the settings for different effects.

BMFont tool

Once you're done with the settings you can click Options => Visualize or hit the V key to see a preview of how the texture will be packed.

Finally, click Options -> Save bitmap font as or hit Ctrl+S to export the font file. The textures will also be saved at this location, you'll need to add both of these to your game's content.

Building the font file with the MonoGame Pipeline

We need to load the font file into the game, but first we need to add a reference to the MonoGame.Extended.Content.Pipleine.dll that comes with an importer and processor for BMFont files.

See: Referencing the Content Pipeline in Installation on how to add a reference to MonoGame.Extended.Content.Pipleine.dll

Once the reference is added, you can add the font file and texture to the content. If all goes well, the importer and processor should be selected automatically.

MonoGame.Extended BMFont importer

Don't forget to Rebuild your content.

Rendering text in your game

If you've referenced the MonoGame.Extended.dll from your game project the code is pretty straightforward.

First load the font into an instance of a BitmapFont variable.

_bitmapFont = Content.Load<BitmapFont>("my-font");

Then in your Draw method use the DrawString extension method to render some text much like you would with a traditional SpriteFont.

_spriteBatch.Begin();
_spriteBatch.DrawString(_bitmapFont, "Hello World", new Vector2(50, 50), Color.White);
_spriteBatch.End();

And observe the result!

MonoGame.Extended Bitmap Fonts