Tutorial 4 is now available. This tutorial comes in at around 1:40 and covers both the creation of a new class called AngelCodeFont, but also changes to the Image and SpriteSheet classes. The changes to the Image and SpriteSheet classes was necessary so that I could make use of vertex arrays which significantly improves the performance on the iPhone. The AngelCodeFont class allows you to specify an image and control file which has been created using an AngelCode bitmap font tool and then render any string you like to the screen.
Information about the website and tools that I use are in the tutorial, but I have included links below as well. Their Hiero tool is hosted on n4te.com who has recently worked on the Hiero tool to allow it to handle unicode fonts etc and make changes to the GUI.
UPDATE 02/05/11: We have also released our own bitmap font tool that produces the same output files as Hiero and can therefore be used in place of Hiero. This app is a native OS X app and provides a ton of configuration to get your fonts looking just the way you want them too.
The project created with this tutorial can be downloaded from the link below.
As always, let me know if you have any questions or queries. The next tutorial will be on Animation followed by a TileMap tutorial.
Enjoy!
Mike