TMC Kerning for Game Maker

This project adds Kerning Support to Game Maker 1.4 and Game Maker 2.0

Kerning defines spacing between 2 characters, a character pair which tightens up texts being drawn.

Game Maker 1.4 does not have Kerning while Game Maker 2 supposedly has it but my research found all the Kerning values are set to -1, meaning all characters have the exact same spacing between characters.

So I created a function called

draw_text_kerning()

that allows kerning doing lookups in a ds_map

and I wrote a tool to define the entries for the ds map.

Add a font resource to Game Maker, select the font in the draw event and draw the text using draw_text_kerning()

Use the tool provided (It's a windows Program, setup Included), select the same font you used to create the font resource in the tool and click the "To ds_map". copy the code and paste it in your project. You can have as many kerning maps are you need, for each of your font.

I did not include much more functionality that the draw_text_kerning. However the function is simple and can be cloned to support scaling; just multiply the kerning value with the scale... You can also implement your own text_width that would take the kerning into account.

Quality level in the game maker font resource and anti aliasing make each character a little wider, however the kerning information the tool generates should still be compatible with all the font setting as the wideness of the font does not affect the kerning spacing. However if you want to compare the result with say Microsoft Word or Notepad, a plain jane font with no anti aliasing should be used.