Calligro

Online bitmap font creator.

Available at calligro.ideasalmanac.com

Desktop version is hosted on itch.io

Calligro generates bitmap fonts in the AngelCode's BMFont format. It can be used to convert a TTF but unlike the original BMFont and other tools it can also generate bitmap fonts from custom images.

The workflow is as follows:

• generate a Calligro template (which is a PNG or Aseprite image)
• draw your characters on the template in any graphics editor (Photoshop, Gimp, Aseprite, anything else)
• load the filled template back to Calligro and get a bitmap font

Everything is calculated on the client side. No files are sent or stored on the server.

There is also an offline version available for Windows and Linux. It has the same core features but is a little bit more convenient to use. It also detects system fonts better.

Samples

The BMFont format has existed for a while and a lot of game frameworks, libraries and engines support it out of the box. Some examples and more details on compatibility can be found in the samples/ directory.

Tutorial

A tutorial is available at calligro.ideasalmanac.com.

Get additional support on the Ideas Almanac Discord server.

Use case

Calligro is useful when you need to draw a custom font stored as a spritesheet. Pixelart font would be a good use.

If you only want to convert an existing truetype font into a bitmap font, you can also try one of those tools instead:

• AngelCode's BMFont
• Hiero
• ShoeBox

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute: thanks!

This is a regular React/TypeScript project:

# install dependencies and start a dev server with hot reloading
npm ci
npm run dev

# or if you want to run the desktop app
npx tauri dev

# run unit tests
npm run test

Our actions use Node 20.

Production builds

Web

Create the production web build in the dist/ directory:

npm run build

Desktop

Create the production destop build for your OS in the src-tauri/target/release/ directory:

npx tauri build