I released a new tool today! It takes pixel font 'tilesets' and converts them into actual TTF fonts! It is also 100% web-based, meaning that you can try it out right now. And this post details the development process for it. Also it doesn't have a catchy name for now since I've not come up with a good pun yet.
Context and motivation
Perhaps a thing that I'm less known for, but between various technical work I also draw various pixel fonts. Although the published collection is fairly neat and organized, there is also a number of unpublished fonts featuring unusual sizes and styles that seem like a good idea up until the point where you draw Latin W or Cyrillic Й (the ultimate nemesis of a fixed-height font):
- Create your own text using hundreds of fonts from classic Arcade games.
- Create a PNG from text emojis. Invert Colors in a PNG. Invert the color of each pixel in a PNG image. Extract APNG Frames. Extract all frames from an APNG image. Play a PNG animation (APNG) frame by frame. Created animated PNGs (APNGs). Create a Glitch PNG.
- Use this online tool to quickly remove the background from an image. Select the pixels that you want to delete or erase to make a PNG sticker with a custom size. Images can be uploaded from your computer or imported directly via search or website URL. Zoom in and use your mouse or finger to make parts of the image transparent. Kapwing’s Background Eraser is free, easy, and online with no.
- Pixel fonts are fonts that use tiny blocks (pixels) in the letters and are meant for small text sizes. Pixel fonts were especially popular during the 90s, and were used to provide clear text before the rise of high resolution displays. You can use these free pixel fonts to make retro computer themed designs.
In this example, we load PNG text written in Bungee Shade font that says 'New York City' in the input field and create transparent text from it by removing its background. To make the background transparent, we specify the hexadecimal color code 'FFFFFF', which corresponds to the white color in the options.
Rest assured, if you draw many of these, you need a good process for editing, previewing, and saving the fonts.
I would at first experiment with FontStruct (tracing pixel glyphs in Font Forge or other 'conventional' editors didn't seem like a good time), but found that the tool wasn't strictly geared towards pixel fonts (which is fair) - you could absolutely draw a pixel font in it, but tools the tools would usually do region rather than cell operations (e.g. the eraser highlights a rectangle to erase). Still, my account still spots early versions of what would later become 6w4 and 6w3 fonts:
Later I found BitFontMaker, which was a little better, but the paginated glyph grid left some to be desired (I would much rather just draw multiple glyphs on spot), and so did the drawing tools. So, in 2014 I made BitFontReader, which would process a PNG file and pump out JSON for BitFontMaker:
BitFontReader lasted for a while, but, as my fonts started to cover more and more glyphs (for example, 7w7 has almost 500), I found that drawing all your glyphs in a row isn't such a reliable approach - for example, if you miss a glyph, everything afterwards will be offset, so you'll have to find the spot, select everything on the right, move that a few pixels right... so sometime in 2016 I made another tool, still pumping out BitFontMaker JSON, but taking a 'tileset' instead:
This was an improvement - drawing a 300-glyph font was no longer so crazy, but the process remained slightly janky (import image, export JSON, import JSON, export TTF, fix-up TTF using FontForge scripts), so I never ended up publicly releasing it, only having sent it to a bunch of people that I talked to about fonts often. Still, this was how I made most of the fonts I released.
Then, in late 2018 Rob Meek (creator of FontStruct) open-sourced the font generator library that was used by the service, and it had been on my mind ever since - if I were to solve a couple other technical challenges, everything could be so nice - I wouldn't have to go through several pages just to get a new TTF file, I wouldn't have to mess with FontForge scripts just to make fonts act right, and I could even make fonts larger than 12x12 pixels!
On that subject, how many 'medium-sized' (>12px height) TTF/OTF pixel fonts have you seen? I think I've only seen a few in my life - perhaps because most people have better things to do with their lives than carefully tracing their pixel drawings in a vector-based font editor.
It would take some time for me to finally get around to it.
Technical
Font generation
As per above, with fonthx the actual generation, I'm left to feed it glyph data and input parameters.
Most of that was pretty straightforward, though I found that different software may interpret font parameters differently, leading me on a trail of interesting discoveries like this 'you can't really use line gap' article (~17 years later, some software still uses em size for line size), or this gem of a tooltip in FontForge:
A fork of fonthx with additions that I found useful for this tool can be found on GitHub.
.png "Creator"){kind=tracking}
Resource loading
fonthx uses haxe.Resource to load a number of text files with charset data.
When targeting JS, files included that way are embedded into source code in base64 format.
Although the files themselves are admirably uniform, base64 versions are less so, and would add up to 3.2MB worth of JS code total. That's kind of a lot - the rest of my application compiles to less than 100KB of minified JS.
After some consideration I decided to get around this by integrating pako (pako_inflate.min.js is mere 22.6KB) and fetching a 320KB ZIP file with charset text files to populate haxe.Resource's internal list on boot.
Contour tracing
So on the aforementioned glyph data: as you might be aware, pixel fonts are made of pixels. TTF/OTF fonts are not made of pixels - not until they are drawn onto your screen anyway. They are made out of paths (CCW paths defining shapes and CW paths defining holes in them). So you want to convert your pixels into paths.
The simplest approach would be to simply generate a square for each pixel:
Pixel Font Generator Png Creator
This is okay, although not very efficient, and some rendering artifacts may appear on unusual font sizes.
BitFontMaker goes for a slightly better approach, merging the squares but keeping the additional vertices:
Ideally, of course, you would want an optimized path - akin to what you would trace by hand:
So I wrote a simple algorithm for that:
You can read more about it in its own post.
In conclusion
Pixel Font Generator Png Transparent
Overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out:
- The tool is web-based, lightweight, and has no external dependencies.
- The tool can also be downloaded and used offline (via itch.io).
(which does not require running native code either) - The tool allows for arbitrary sized fonts, an improvement from BitFontMaker.
- The tool allows to edit most of the useful metadata, also an improvement.
- Combination of pixel-based input, JSON settings, and a variety of ways to re-import images (file dialog, drag and drop, even pasting them directly) allows for comfortable workflows in existing tools.
Have fun!
Related posts:
Free pixel font that you can use online with the MockoFun text designer. If you are looking for a pixel font for making a text design or a text logo, use this free font online. The pixel fonts are great for creating a gaming text for example.
Make a pixel alphabet font in just a few simple steps. There are 3 free pixel fonts included in this pack. Change the pixel text, add layer styles and customize it to your liking. Make pixel letters by saving the image as text PNG with transparent background.
Edit the pixel font online NOW! It’s free 🙂