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Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

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Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#1

Post by newtrino »

Karektar is a React/TS app for building exportable bitmap fonts from custom glyph sets.

You can submit your own input string, and the app will generate the gallery of unique glyphs. Build your own designs using the various tools available, then export it to an OTF format when you're done.

This is my first front-end project, and one I picked up to learn React. I'd love to hear any feedback, especially on usability and additional features you'd like to see. Cheers!

Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer
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Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#7

Post by alwa »

This is fun! Since you asked for feedback:

- I couldn’t find a way to clear pixels after drawing them, short of using the trash can icon to clear the whole glyph. Especially since I’m on a phone, an “eraser” tool would have been handy for those couple of stray pixels in an otherwise happy tracing.

In Pentacom BitFontMaker (which, as a sister comment points out, Karektar seems to be based on), it looks like they avoided an explicit “eraser” tool by causing strokes to clear pixels whenever the stroke started on a filled pixel.

- My phone has a relatively small screen, and the fixed footer text covers the bottom row of controls such that I can’t use them.

Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#8

Post by aravindet »

Nice! I'd built something similar to make fonts for the Adafruit GFX library. http://aravind.rs/fruitfont/

Its export format is C code that defines GFXGlyph and GFXFont structs.

Doesn't work well on mobile and multiple size/style variants doesn't work yet. This was mostly the result of yak shaving after I set out to make a watch face for my SQFMI Watchy.

Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#10

Post by newtrino »

junon wrote: post #3

"Submit" on mobile doesn't seem to work. I assume it's supposed to update the preview, right?

It's meant to update your glyph set, assuming that you've updated the input string to include new glyphs that were not in the previous set. You can observe the change on mobile by looking at the glyph gallery, which you access by tapping the current glyph icon in the top left of the canvas.
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