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Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

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Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#11
post #7

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 avoid…

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it! To address your points:

- There is in fact an eraser tool available, as well as shape and fill tools. You can access them on mobile by tapping on the pencil icon, which opens a dropdown menu.

- Early on when I was developing Karektar, I did in fact avoid including an explicit eraser tool, instead using the approach you described. However it felt a bit finicky to use, and that including a separate eraser tool would give an additional degree of freedom. For instance, if you are intending to draw on mobile, but your touch accidentally interacts with a filled pixel, you can still continue to draw without worrying about erasing work you hadn't intended to undo.

- I had a feeling the footer text might pose an issue, apologies about that! The addition was an afterthought, specifically to allow people to access the original repo; but I'll aim to fix it soon.

By the way, towards the first two points: I did also include a modal to describe the key functional aspects, which can be accessed by clicking/tapping on the "Help" button. This was to ensure that people would be aware of elements such as how to access additional tools on mobile. However it seems like some of the interactive elements may still be unintuitive, so I'll see if I can make them clearer. Thanks again for your comment!

Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#12
post #5

This looks way too much like the editor in Pentacom' BitFontMaker https://www.pentacom.jp/pentacom/bitfontmaker2/

Admittedly I did take inspiration from BitFontMaker, and a couple of other tools as well, but with the hope of building on them in some ways.

But one design choice of Pentaocm's tool, which I really appreciate, is how the individual glyph previews update as you make changes on the main canvas. This was an aspect I also implemented in Karektar, though with a larger gallery for more legibility.

A new feature I did develop was the ability to input a custom query for your own unique glyph set. To my knowledge, that is not a feature you'll find in most of these tools.

Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#13

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.

This is really neat, thanks for sharing! To my recollection, I did actually come across GFXFont during my investigations on how to handle font exports, but I wasn't aware of the existence of any online tools which exported to that format.

Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#14

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.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#16
Fun! I took my exported font over to https://fontdrop.info to have a quick look at some lorem ipsum.

Had some trouble figuring out what the "Submit" button was for. Wasn't until fontdrop revealed I was missing capitals that I went back and experimentally added an uppercase to the sample.

Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#19
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.

What is the point of the sentence at the bottom then?

Re: Show HN: Karektar – Bitmap Font Designer

#20
I'd love for this to also allow for shades of gray (the Fallout 1/2 bitmap font is antialiased). It would likely mean harder OTF exporting process for you though. Color fonts are still not supported everywhere, my last attempt ended up with PNG-in-SVG in the OTF.
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