Greetings,

I'm trying to achieve some good uv map packing for an user-created bitmap font.

Can you point me to the name of the file and the name of your packing function?

I'm not sure if the algorithm that I use in BMFont is suitable for uv map packing. It works well for bitmap fonts since there is little variation between the sizes of each glyph, but when the sizes vary a lot the algorithm tend to leave a lot of unused space in the texture.

Anyway, the starting point for the packing algorithm I use is in the method CFontPage::AddCharsToPage that you'll find here: http://svn.code.sf.net/p/bmfont/code/trunk/source/fontpage.cpp.

Regards,

Andreas

This is essentially state of the art, and written by a fellow GameDev member to boot.
http://clb.demon.fi/files/RectangleBinPack.pdf
There's probably ready made code out there... I believe Freetype-GL has an implementation.

Thanks a lot for the link to that article. I hadn't seen it before. Promptly added to my reference DB :)

I didn't do a detailed read, but I don't think any of the algorithms presented in the article matches what I do in BMFont, though the skyline algorithm does appear to have some similarities.

Thanks, folks, that will help along the way! :-)