ScrewtapelloMay 18

I have begun writing a Decker deck that can import fonts from Rob Hagemans' Hoard of Bitfonts. It's been kind of painful because Decker's scripting language is a bit awkward at text manipulation, and the YAFF file format is geared for human consumption rather than machine-readability. Nevertheless, I can now read a sequence of glyphs, with the Unicode codepoint they represent, the strike bitmap, and whatever other properties the font provides.

Still need to actually translate all that into a form Decker can use, of course.

#Decker

Show threadScrewtapelloMay 19

I can now import YAFF fonts, including the font name, the character images, and the left- and right-bearing values so they're horizontally spaced properly.

I still need to support vertical alignment, as well as recoding fonts to DeckRoman where possible, so they're useful for non-ASCII text.

Featured in this screenshot is "Oberon", the system font used by the Oberon operating system.

#decker

Show threadScrewtapelloMay 20

Today I worked on font encodings: if a YAFF file describes the Unicode codepoint a glyph is supposed to represent, the importer will put it in the right spot for Decker's "DeckRoman" encoding. If the font *doesn't* describe codepoints, it's probably a symbol font and the pictures aren't supposed to line up with characters anyway.

I also worked on the vertical-alignment issue I mentioned yesterday... but after getting it working, I seem to have broken it again. Ah well, something for tomorrow.

Featured in these screenshots are Espy Sans, the UI font from Apple's Newton, and Elektra, a symbol font for electronic schematics from the Oberon project.

#Decker #pixelfont

Show threadScrewtapelloMay 21

It occurred to me today that the FontStruct website has a lot of pixel fonts on it, and people might want to import those into Decker. When you download a font, there's TTF and OTF and WOFF versions, none of which are any use to me, but there's also a `.glyphs` file which is plain text with some kind of JSON-like data. Decker can read JSON data, maybe I could just slurp it in..?

Turns out, it's *not* JSON, it's "OpenStep Property List" syntax - the data format that MacOS X used in the 1990s before the XML-based format that they used before the binary format they use today.

I'm not going to write a parser combinator library for Decker. I'm not, I'm *not*, I'm NOT. *grits teeth, clenches fists*

Show threadScrewtapelloMay 26

It turns out I misunderstood. Fontstruct doesn't give you Glyphs file by default, but if you edit a font you can ask it to export a Glyphs file, and a lot of creators on Fontstruct specifically grant permission for other people to clone and edit their fonts. Some creators who distribute their fonts outside the Fontstruct website will even include the Glyphs file for completeness (which is what confused me initially).

Also by an astonishing coincidence, after I posted my complaint above, Decker's creator posted an OpenStep Property List parser as example code. So I figured I'd at least poke around and see how far I got.

So here's the font from Usagi Yojimbo for the C64, as rendered in Fontstruct by @patrick_h_lauke and exported as a Glyphs file, and imported Into Decker. It, uh, needs some work.

https://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/1723/

#decker #pixelfont

Show threadScrewtapello

I can now import FontStruct pixel fonts more reliably. I found a really nice one called "Metro Sans" that was CC licensed so I could clone it and get the Glyphs file. Unfortunately, if you look at the test panel on the right, you'll see that "J" is touching up against "K".

I don't know why that is. The TTF export from FontStruct works fine, but in the Glyphs export the J glyph is marked as being 5px wide, despite being visibly 8px wide, and the "character width" guide in the online editor being drawn at 8px. If I add a pixel to the right and re-export, the width is recalculated correctly. If I delete the pixel and re-export, it goes back to being wrong. I guess it's a bug at their end?

Nothing Decker users can't fix with Decker's official font-editing deck, but still a pain.

#decker #pixelfont

May 27 at 2:17pmWeb
Show threadScrewtapelloMay 28

I contacted FontStruct's support and they said "yeah, that looks like a bug, we'll take a look when we have time" (fair enough, I'm guessing it's not a high-traffic feature in the site). They also gestured at the undocumented JSON REST API the website's frontend uses to load data from the backend.

It's JSON, so it's not as sexy as an OpenStep Property List file, but it's a lot easier to work with, and it's going to be battle-tested because it's what the whole site is built on.

Show threadScrewtapelloMay 29

I've published my Decker Font Importer deck, which imports fonts in various retro pixel-font formats for use in your Decker decks.

It's not perfect, but it works for me for most things, and I'd like to get some real-world feedback so I know what to focus on.

https://screwtapello.itch.io/decker-font-importer/devlog/1537716/announcing-decker-font-importer

#decker #pixelfont

Show threadPatrick H. LaukeMay 27
@Screwtapello if you're finding more oddities, it might be worth emailing [email protected] to see if it's their generator that's borked
Show threadSpace HoboMay 28

@Screwtapello That is an amazing pixel font!

If I still had to put up with those, that's the one I'd use. Right now I use Jost* as my main UI font for everything, and it really classes up the joint.

Show threadScrewtapelloMay 28

@spacehobo The original version is apparently based on the displays on the Copenhagen Metro... or perhaps in defiance of them, it's not entirely clear. It's a great font, though!

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/723864/metro_sans

Metro Sans

A Fontstruction designed by Christian Munk (CMunk)

fontstruct.com