This is a browser-based tool to convert TTF, OTF, WOFF and WOFF2 fonts into .fnt files for use with the Playdate SDK.
A modern browser. Tested in Firefox 125 and Chromium 124.
The UI was not designed for use on mobile or other small screens. In fact, you might argue it wasn't designed at all.
- Left-to-right text.
- No clipping or incomplete rendering of characters, ever.
- Kerning.
- Customizations like italics and weight. These are easy to add; let me know if you have a need for it.
- Large character sets may cause your browser to hang when you make any changes. This happens because browser APIs don't offer a way to read the kerning table, so the tool brute-forces the kerning table by measuring every pair of characters separately. If this becomes a problem, I can add some code to parse the kerning table from the font file directly. Again, let me know if you need this.
The Playdate's font format is very simple, so a lot of features will never be supported, such as:
- Right-to-left and other text directions.
- Ligatures and other contextual replacements.
- Combining Unicode characters, like accents. But note that you can use a single codepoint where one exists; for example, to obtain
á, use U+00E1 Latin Small Letter A with Acute instead ofa(U+0061 Latin Small Letter A) combined with◌́(U+0301 Combining Acute Accent).
It's just vanilla HTML, JavaScript and CSS, no build tools required. You can just open index.html in your browser and start hacking.
- tophat by Daniel Dickison is great, but it will clip glyphs that draw anything left of the insertion point, and also doesn't seem to import kerning data. If you want to manually edit the output of pdfontconv, tophat is highly recommended.
- PDFontTool runs on Windows only. I have not been able to evaluate it.
- Playdate Caps is the official font editing tool, but it no longer supports import.
- This forum thread has some links to other tools and methods you might try.