How hard would it be to make a Bitmap Text Tool?

Develop
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Bitmap fonts have been broken for a while now. This is a problem, as they’re incredibly useful for pixel art.

It sounds like the text tool is fundamentally built around vector fonts, the libraries it uses for text rendering don’t even try to support bitmap fonts, and the fact that it worked at all in the past was more or less an accident.

But bitmap fonts are simple!! They’re basically a grid of pixels with none of the layout complexity of vector fonts! So how hard would it be to make a dedicated Bitmap Text Tool?

I’m vaguely considering diving into the code and trying to build this. It might be easier than trying to fix the existing Text Tool, but I don’t know if it’s the way to go or if anyone else would even appreciate the work anyway.

– Frost

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Actually, bitmap fonts should work again, Alvin and me tried to make sure it worked, at the least, and this was done with an eye on both emoji as well as font-hinting necessary for CJK fonts. Though, the default fontconfig on many systems will hide the bitmap formats and only show vector formats.

Text tool is currently being rewritten, as it happens, I am currently fighting fonts, though right now I’m getting myself kicked by the UI code, so that’s been slow. You can try to play with the latest nightly to see bitmap fonts working.

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Oh, sweet!! I looked in stable a few months ago, but didn’t think to look in the recent nightlies. Definitely gonna have to try that out, thanks!