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BESmoothFontGen

A tool that generates "smooth" font textures and data for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. The smooth font is a special variant of the in-game font seen in certain places within the game such as:

Default font for the Japanese language
Server list screen
Various miscellaneous descriptions

How to Use

Windows

Install Java 8
Download BESmoothFontGen and extract the downloaded ZIP file
Download msdfgen and extract the downloaded ZIP file
Place msdfgen.exe in the msdfgen folder inside the extracted BESmoothFontGen folder
Open config.json in a text editor and edit the file to include settings listed in the Configuration section
Place the font files specified in the configuration in the fonts folder
Run the BESmoothFontGen.bat script to start the smooth font generation
Generated textures and data will be placed in the smooth folder

Linux

The installation and usage is mostly same as Windows, however you must compile msdfgen binary from the source code by yourself. See Chlumsky/msdfgen for more information.
Generating the smooth font on Linux is several times faster than on Windows.

Configuration

Example configuration

{
    "threads": 16,
    "range": {
        "from": "00",
        "to": "FF"
    },
    "fonts": [
        {
            "file": "noto-jp-regular.ttf",
            "size": 38,
            "padding": 0
        }
    ],
    "additionalArgs": "-pxrange 8 -translate 0 6"
}

Settings

threads: Numbers of threads to use when generating the font texture.
range: Unicode character range to generate the smooth font of. If you want to generate 3 texture files ranging from Unicode 0x0000 to 0x02FF, you type 00 in the from field, and 02 in the to field.
fonts: An array of fonts to use when generating the smooth font. When generating each character, this tool will first look at the topmost font in the array. If the character is not included in that font, it will check next fonts until the character is found.
- file: Name of the font file. TTF and OTF font formats are supported, and font files defined here must be located in the fonts folder.
- size: Size of the character to render in points.
- padding: Amount of extra padding to add to the width of each character in this font.
additionalArgs: Additional parameters passed to the msdfgen process when generating the font texture. See Chlumsky/msdfgen for more information.

Compiling

You can compile BESmoothFontGen yourself with the following command:

./gradlew build

The compiled jar file will be placed in the build/libs folder.

Smooth Font Specification

This section contains the unofficial documentation of the smooth font format used by Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. Smooth font format is not officially documented, and this format may be changed in future versions of the game.

Overall structure

Both the font texture and the width data are separated in multiple pages, where each page contains data for 256 characters in the Unicode table. Files are named in the format of smooth_XX.(png|fontdata) where the XX is the first two digits of the Unicode codepoint in hexadecimal.

Texture

Font textures are stored as PNG images in the font/smooth folder of the resource pack. The texture dimension is 1024x1024 pixels, with the 16 rows, 16 columns grid of 64x64 glyph textures. Each glyph texture uses the MTSDF format, a combination of MSDF and true SDF in the alpha channel.

Width

Character widths are stored in binary files with the extension of fontdata in the font/smooth folder of the resource pack. The first 4 bytes in the file are all 0x00. Then, for each character in the page, the file writes little-endian 32-bit floats between 0.0 and 1.0 where the width of 1.0 the full 64 pixels of the glyph grid.

KabanFriends/BESmoothFontGen