Font Friend

2021 (or 2022 lmao): I'm working on a new version of Font Friend that can generate kerning pairs for sprite fonts. I might make that functionality paid—I'll make sure anyone who decided to donate in the past gets it for free.

Font Friend is a tool that quickly lets you preview sprite fonts.

I love making pixel fonts for my games, but hate manually moving characters around in my image editor to form words and "test" the font. Font Friend makes previewing your in-progress font much quicker.

Open the image with Font Friend, tell it what characters are in the font, and you can immediately start testing it out.

⚠ Font Friend was primarily created with pixel art sprite fonts for GameMaker Studio 2 in mind, but you can use it with sprite fonts intended for anything, as long as the image is formatted properly. See "Preparing your font" below for details.

Opening a font

Features

• Quickly preview a sprite font.
• Auto-reloads on file change, so you can see your changes immediately.
• Toggle between proportional and monospaced mode.
• Configure spacing, line height, colour, and more.
  • Please note that Font Friend only has uniform letterspacing, not kerning, as it was designed primarily for pixel art.

Auto-reloads while you edit

Usage

Preparing your font:

• Currently Font Friend only supports PNG images.
• Make sure your image is formatted as a horisontal spritesheet (all characters, one after the other, along one horisontal line). Each "frame" (the maximum width that a character can fill) should be equal width with no padding.
• The background should be transparent, or a solid colour.

An example font is bundled with Font Friend.

Using the tool:

• Click "Open Image" and select your PNG spritesheet.
  • You will be asked to specify a "map string" (which characters are in the font, in the correct order). Click the "Map String" button if you wish to update it later.
• Configure parameters such as font style, spacing, etc. to your liking.
• Click on the "Preview" box and start typing!
• If enabled, Font Friend will automatically reload the image file if it has been changed, so you can see every edit you make in action instantly.
  • If the width of the image changes, Font Friend will assume it is because you added or removed characters in your font. You will then be asked to confirm or update the map string.

For bug reports or other comments, throw me a message on Twitter.