Interest in adding Playdate font support?

[gingerbeardman]

A while ago I added initial Playdate export support to Bits'n'Picas and put my source at https://gitlab.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas/-/merge_requests/4 (it seemed more active than your GitHub at the time).

My old code is on GitHub at: https://github.com/gingerbeardman/bitsnpicas/tree/playdate

If there is any interest in that, I can rebase it? But, really, my code is very naïve, only partially complete (no .fnt export).

Since then the Playdate has received a single file font export that makes much more sense to support for import and export.

Goal

The goal would be to have Playdate compatible export and import.

Format details

The Playdate font format has an open spec, and consists of either:

1. combined
   • .FNT file with BASE64 encoded image data
   • Example: quanpixel.fnt.zip

or

2. separate
   • separate .FNT text file containing character metrics, kerning pairs
   • associated .PNG (this is what my code exports)
   • Example: quanpixel.fnt.png.zip

Which one I choose varies, depending on whether I need access to the PNG.

Supported characters

• Playdate supports all code points in the first four Unicode planes, up to U+3FFFF
• Most fonts support just the ASCII range (which is what my code exported)

Other example font

Some are included in the Playdate SDK (supports: Linux, macOS, Windows)

• https://play.date/dev/ (no account required)

Alternative tools

Web-based font tools that support the format:

• https://kaasiand.cool/tophat/ (this is what I use mostly today)
• https://play.date/caps/ (requires account)

[gingerbeardman]

Exciting!!!