mcfonts

mcfonts is a versatile, fast, and extensible package for working with Minecraft fonts.
mcfonts works with any font JSON and can export every kind of texture and size, no matter the amount or complexity.
It can be used anywhere in places that deal with Minecraft fonts.

> ⚠️ mcfonts is in beta. API may change at any time; read the changelog carefully.

Table of contents

• 📦 Installation
• 🧮 Features
• 🛠 Usage
• ❓ Why?
• 📒 Documentation
  • Building locally
• 📰 Changelog
• 📜 License
  • 🚫 Disclaimer
• 📎 Links

📦 Installation

mcfonts is available on PyPI. It requires a Python version of at least 3.11.0.

To install mcfonts with pip, run:

python -m pip install mcfonts

If you would like the ability to generate documentation alongside it, run:

python -m pip install mcfonts[docs]

"externally-managed-environment"

This error occurs on some Linux distributions, such as Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 23.04. It can be solved by either:

1. Using a virtual environment (venv)
2. Using pipx

Dependencies

• fontTools: for exporting to OpenType
• lxml: for fast XML parsing
• Pillow: for processing font textures
• tinyunicodeblock: for font coverage summaries
• jsonschema: for the font JSON validation
• unirange: for special unirange shortcuts

Optional dependencies

docs: Generating documentation

• sphinx: for generating documentation
• sphinx-autoapi: for generating code documentation
• sphinxext-opengraph: for meta tags
• sphinx-immaterial: for documentation theme

🧮 Features

• handles these providers:
  • space
  • bitmap
  • legacy_unicode
  • ttf
  • unihex
  • reference
• warns of invalid data
• finds oversights that the Vanilla client does not notice
• generates optimized and space-saving glyph paths
• works with any font, not just Vanilla
• works on fonts with double, triple, or higher scales
• generates summaries of fonts
• allows easy inspection of a font's details
• contains glyph utilities and compacting functions
• works on new 1.20+ unihex and reference providers
• exports in 3 different formats

🛠 Usage

Using mcfonts is simple.

import mcfonts

font = mcfonts.from_java_font_file("path/to/font.json")
# Do stuff with `font`...

Exporting

You can easily export to other formats. Currently, there are 3 supported:

• OpenType
• YAFF
• Unihex

import mcfonts

font = mcfonts.from_java_font_file("path/to/font.json")
exported = font.export(
  mcfonts.export_formats.,
  {
    "name": "My cool font"
  }
)

That's it. You can write the result of font.export -> bytes to any file to save it.

If you have a font with ~200 characters, it exports in ~0.3 seconds.
If you have a font with ~2,000 characters, it exports in ~3.2 seconds.
If you have a font with ~13,000 characters, it exports in ~9.9 seconds.
If you have a font with ~60,000 characters, you've made a mistake. (your font exports in about 1 minute, 15 seconds.)

❓ Why?

⏳ It's fast

In the time it has taken you to read this sentence, a font with 1,000 glyphs has already been generated.

A 13,000-glyph font takes 10 seconds.

A simple 100 glyph font? A fraction of a second; it takes 0.1s.

➿ It's versatile

mcfonts works on fonts of any height, ascent, and size.

It correctly compensates and warns about oversized characters, translucent textures, and invalid data.

🧠 It makes sense

Fonts are organized by a class.

Providers, too, have their own classes.

Exporting and compacting are separated into their own functions, which makes debugging and modification easy.

> mcfonts does not fix mistakes in fonts.

It will extrapolate missing data, but empty or corrupt textures, invalid numbers, or extreme cases will result in an error when trying to create a MinecraftFont instance with them.

This gives you the ability to correct these problems instead of silently making them work (sometimes with limited effectiveness) and keeping you in the dark about future issues.

📜 It's documented

mcfonts has extensive documentation, both externally and in the source code. Functions are carefully written with rST-style docstrings, and module variables are given precise descriptions.

📒 Documentation

Documentation for mcfonts is available at https://mcfonts.readthedocs.io.

Building locally

You can build the documentation yourself by grabbing a copy of the source code:

git clone https://gitlab.com/whoatemybutter/mcfonts.git
cd mcfonts/docs

The documentation has a few requirements; install them all with:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Run make html to begin building the documentation. It will be at _build/html/index.html.

📰 Changelog

The changelog is at CHANGELOG.md.

📜 License

mcfonts is licensed under the MIT license.
Fonts created with this tool are under no explicit license; you can license them in any way you want. This includes under a paid license.
By default, fonts created by this tool are in the public domain.

Although credit is embedded in exported fonts, removing this credit is allowed, and the function parameter mcfonts.MinecraftFont.export(include_credit) may be set to False.

Keeping it in is greatly appreciated and helps make mcfonts better. There is no disadvantage to leaving the credit in.

🚫 Disclaimer

> mcfonts is not affiliated, endorsed, created, supported, or an official product > by Mojang Studios, or by Microsoft Corporation, or any of their associates in any way.

📎 Links

• Font - Minecraft Wiki
• OpenType specification
• FontForge