Project Properties
Introduction
The project properties window allows you to modify properties that apply across the entire project (as opposed to a single screen or component).
To open the Project Properties tab, select Edit -> Properties.
Canvas Width/Height
Canvas Width and Height determines the size of the canvas. For games these values can represent the default resolution for your game. For mobile apps these can represent the logical units used when laying out your UI. Objects that sit directly in a screen (as opposed to in another container) are positioned and sized according to Canvas Width and Canvas Height.
Canvas Width and Height can be changed through the project properties page.
Localization
Localization can be added to a Gum project through the Localization File file picker. For more information see the Localization page.
Font Ranges
The Font Ranges setting controls which characters are included in default fonts. The Font Ranges value is ignored when using custom font (.fnt) files.
The default Font Ranges value is 32-126,160-255 which maps to the first page of the Bitmap font generator character set, labeled as Latin + Latin Supplement.
Various websites provide a list of unicode character sets such as https://unicode-table.com/en/blocks/
Font ranges can be modified manually, or can be modified by creating a .gumfcs file to automatically create font ranges.
Modifying Ranges Directly
Font Ranges can be manually modified to add or remove characters from a .fnt file. The format supports comma separated ranges, including individual values. For example, to add the Latin Extended A set, the Font Ranges value can be changed to 32-126,160-255,256-383. Note that the last range of 256-383 could be merged with the previous to produce the following range: 32-126,160-383. Note that the ranges are inclusive on both ends, so a range of 160-383 will include the characters 160 and 383 along with all values in between.
Changing the font ranges immediately refreshes the page. Note that all fonts are re-created so this operation can take some time.
The following animation shows the Ā character being included and excluded from the Font Range, causing it to appear and disappear in the displayed text.
Note that expanding the character set results in larger font PNG files which can impact the size and performance of games using the Gum files.
Modifying Font Ranges with .gumfcs File
A .gumfcs file can be used to control the Font Range value. This is especially useful if you have the text that is used by your game (such as a localization file), but you do not know which characters are actually needed.
Before making changes, be sure to back up your Gum project or have a commit that you can revert to in Git - switching to a .gumfcs file removes the previously-assigned values.
To use a .gumfcs file:
Check the Use Font Character File (.gumfcs) option. Gum creates a .gumfcs file if one doesn't exist.
Navigate to the location where your Gum project is located (.gumx)
Open the .gumfcs file in a text editor
Add or remove characters in the .gumfcs file
Save the file to disk - Gum automatically updates the character sets in response
Font Character Limitations
Each font has its own range of supported characters. You can open Bitmap Font Generator to see which characters are supported for each type. The following screenshot shows the font ranges supported by the Arial font.
Notice that the CJK characters are not supported. By contrast the Batang font face supports CJK Unified Ideographs as shown in the following image:
Gum does not check whether the font range you have added is supported in each of the font faces used in your application. If you are extending your character set, you should verify that the font is supported in Bitmap Font Generator.
Font Spacing Horizontal and Font Spacing Vertical
The Font Spacing Horizontal and Font Spacing Vertical values control the amount of space (padding) added between each letter in the generated .fnt file. These values do not affect the size of the letters in the Editor tab or at runtime, but the additional spacing can be used to separate the letters. This is important if your font rendering may end up implementing any kind of blurring to improve font appearance. This type of blurring may occur if:
You are using linear filtering in your project
If you support zooming out, and if the font texture is blurred when creating mipmaps
The following image shows a portion of an Arial 26 font png zoomed in with Font Spacing Horizontal and Font Spacing Vertical both set to 1 (default):
If the Font Spacing Vertical and Font Spacing Horizontal are both increased to 5, then the spacing in between letters increases to 5 pixels, as shown in the following image:
Typically the two values should be set equally, and the amount of spacing needed depends on how much blurring (mipmap levels) is needed.
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