I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust

It's not really unique to Rust. Scala and Java both support this out of the box.

Rust is built to be memory- and thread-safe by default. Assuming you follow the prescribed rules of the language, multithreading is “free”.

Amdahl’s Law still gets a vote, but at least your app won’t blow up in your face.

each glyph is a multiple of 8px wide

These look to be variable-width fonts. I believe the heights are multiples of 16, but the width will vary by character.

The example tile sheet in the article appears to be 8 pixels wide by my count. Count the width in pixels on the "m" and if it's 7 the font will likely work for you.

Check out The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack (https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/). Each font description includes glyph dimensions and aspect ratios

16. Or an integer multiple of that like 32 or 64. It's in the Step 5: Exporting section

Edit: that's the height, the width is not fixed/I think it varies with the exact font and the kerning. It's probably too big for you anyways.

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.

  Making a complete font set can easily take as long as a year.

Making a complete font set can easily take as long as a year. The tasks include to go from 'A' to 'Z', upper and lower case, plus all the glyphs (brackets, ampersand, exclamation marks etc).

That's when you're limiting the font to purely English usage. If you want to support any other language you have to add more characters, even for languages that also use the latin alphabet (e.g., French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc). Then you may want to support Greek and Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, …

For example, “Noto fonts cover over 77,000 characters, which is around half of the 149,186 characters defined in Unicode 15.0” according to the font's Wikipedia entry.

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

Same here for diacritics in Vietnamese. There are very few font sets which natively support our vast range of diacritics.

I also found Ikenfell to be really delightful!

It was flashpunk! Beacon was rad too — blast from the past, I miss indie games

The game you are probably talking about is Beacon.

Ikenfell

Flashpunk?

just as a note: the company is registered in Russia

If you like platformers, give Celeste a try. The scene in that mockup is a reference to an opening scene from that game.

Hmm, it definitely doesn't allow you to distribute them as open source (or CC or whatever) but I don't know that I'd agree that it forbids you from shipping them with something that's otherwise open source.

Though clearly the intent is that these be used more in the final product stage of the kinds of things that are more rarely open source, games vs. engines or templates.

I found myself thinking about a different copyright corner-case when reading the post and this question: the fact that typefaces aren't copyrightable in the US. Fonts are, as computer programs, but typefaces (and so also fonts that are simple bitmaps) aren't. So this workflow goes from a non-copyrighted source, (the original tilesheet) to a copyrighted output (the TTFs) and also back to a non-copyrighted output too (the output tilesheet/atlas).

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.

Was this an oversight or is there some locale that has just æ and not ø?

Well, Icelandic uses ö in place of ø, but also requires ð and ý which are not included.

Æ is sometimes used in older English texts, though, in words like “encyclopædia” or in plurals of latin-derived words: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_plurals_in_-...

Actually it is impossible to recreate the same font from memory. Even if you tried the font would be in some ways different. With pixel fonts where the grid is very coarse its much easier to do but normal fonts with curves you wont make it. Even if you are using same image of a font as a reference.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.