I absolutely did find examples where I needed to specify. I kind of allude to that in the post, but yeah whenever I add the ability to automate something like this, I almost always make sure to include the ability for me to manually override them. Experience has taught me that no matter how fancy or super special your algorithm is, there's always situations where the naked eye just sees what the robot can't.
I will absolutely consider it. I am getting some good ideas from other comments as well, so I'll put those in my project notes to do as a possible update to the fonts.
I did a quick search, this for Hungarian support, yes? If those are the only two characters I would have to do to support the language, I'm collecting suggestions from other comments in this post as well and might do a 1-year anniversary update to add support for more languages, and I can add this.
some is a homie and does excellent work! They also have a Patreon where you can support/guide them in the creation of new pixel art assets and fonts and stuff like that, if you're into that sort of thing. It's a cool approach, different than mine, and I'm rooting for them.
I wanted to describe how the algorithm works, and show what it looks like to ship a project of that magnitude, and share some of the fun problems complexities that come up. I'd like to see more creatives using code as a way to bolster their projects and reducing tedious work for themselves with automation or deployment scripts, and I think Rust is a really great language for doing this, so I thought it would be inspiring to share how and why I'm doing it.
I agree that it would be overall more valuable to have the whole thing open source online, but sometimes I want to share how I solved problems without open sourcing all my code directly, for various personal reasons. But from the many comments I'm getting across the internet on the article it seems like people are getting a lot of value and motivation out of it, which was the intent, so that makes me happy.
This was just an oversight. I actually got very far into the project before I realized that ø was missing from my set.
It’s something that I could definitely go through and patch into all the fonts, but I was waiting to see if there was enough demand for the effort. I think supporting two more languages would be very cool though.
Not a bad suggestion at all. Lots of fonts even provide ligatures for certain letter pairs so they can touch, but tweak them so they look a bit better.
That kind of thing is another level of polish that I could definitely do, or even just providing more spaced variations.
A combination of word of mouth and itch.io's search system. I have a decent amount of social media followers, many who have used my fonts in the past, so the initial flood of wishlisters put it on the front page for a bit.
After that wave, they get used in various projects here and there, and those projects eventually release or post screenshots. Because it's indie, lots of people also attribute the fonts directly when they post screenshots of their games, posters, videos, and stream overlays where they use them. I am very supportive of people using them, and repost their work, and so it's very casually symbiotic.
They're not lucrative on the scale that you might expect from a company or a popular vector font, but as supplementary income for a solo developer what they bring in helps put food on my table and also helps indie games get made which I think is great.
It also just makes them usable in traditional graphics editors like photoshop, indesign, affinity, aseprite, etc. Those tools do not have the concept of a pixel font, so using a TTF with hinting/antialiasing turned off allows you to use them in those apps.
I definitely could, I would have to do a bit of tests to see what kinds of volumes deserved special treatment.
Usually the way I do things is I start by doing work manually. If I find that there's a common pattern in something I'm doing that could be automated, then I am able to transcribe it into the algorithm because I just follow the same steps I've been using in my head.
This wasn't a thing that actually came up a huge amount, as these glaring pairs aren't tremendously common. But they're just common enough that if I sat down and examined them, I could probably say something like "hey if 1.5 vertical lines worth of pixels are between two letters, kern this extra" or something like that.
Nice catch. That's a culprit of the `auto_kerning_min` property that you'll see on a lot of the fonts. this tells the auto kerner not to exceed that.
I added this parameter because I fouund that for a lot of fonts, squeezing letters together over a certain distance would just look bad, so I would set -1 or -2 as a cap.
It looks like that's just one that snuck past my notice. The word "Fjord" would look strange because of this. This is a good example of how even with the quality testing, things can get through, because I still have to visually glance over hundreds of kerning tests.
One thing that might be a nice adjustment is to have an algorithm that detects the "area" between two letters, so basically how many pixels can volumetrically fit between them, and flag ones that go over a certain threshold. I could then color those tuples as red in the sample text, basically the system marking them as "potential problems" that required an author's look.
It makes me very happy to see people talking about how much work can go into a typeface. Like, these pixel fonts are very quick to make, but fully contoured vector fonts can be tweaked to perfection infinitely, there's always more languages and more diacritics and more weights and styles you could do.
Truly a rabbit hole, but when it's done well it's very worthwhile. I have a lot of respect for font makers.
Glad you brought this up, because it's absolutely true! All the code is not on the site, but I actually allocate and clone a lot of strings and data structures as well. I did optimal code where it was obvious (bitmap copying, easily parallelizable things), and it was SO instant that I didn't even bother trying to optimize the other things. But it could be done!
It's easy to forget how fast on-the-ground languages like Rust and C++ and Go are, not to mention when you use their multi-threading primitives and worker queues/etc.
Is a micron the name of the straight line over the 'a' in Māori? A single pixel line over a bunch of a's is tremendously simple to do in pixel fonts, I could probably add that to all the fonts in a day... hmmmm
Sometimes I would get pretty far into a new font only to realize it was almost a total copy of another. It happened, I just managed to notice before releasing them lol