what bitmap font editors do folks like using?
e: I’m currently using fontforge, but its bitmap support seems like an afterthought, and I keep running into data corruption and crashing bugs. I’m curious what else is out there
Feb 10, 2026, 8:23 AM@joe photoshop plus custom tools
@joe Gimp 😓
Feb 10, 2026, 9:42 AM@alchemicacht @joe I mean, if by a bitmap font you mean just a bitmap with glyphs - sure, gimp can edit bitmaps 😅
@lisyarus @alchemicacht I mean, I’ve considered it too. Are there existing tools for taking an atlas and chopping it into a bdf/otb/whatever?
@joe I have seen people cite using bitfontmaker2 https://www.pentacom.jp/pentacom/bitfontmaker2/ in a lot of places among the itch.io font making community at this point, so I guess they like using it. I am just a font consumer though, so I can't say much about it directly.
Feb 10, 2026, 9:41 AM@joe I've used fontforge. was usable but not an overly nice experience
@joe the last time I tried something like that for an Elian Script font, I used FontForge. It's intended primarily for vector fonts but it can be used for bitmap fonts too.
@oblomov yeah I’ve been using fontforge, and it mostly works, though yeah there’s a lot of stuff for outline font handling that gets in the way. And at least the version I have seems to have a bug where it corrupts bitmap glyphs on save, so I have to keep reloading from the exported bdf and losing links etc
@joe ouch 8-(
Feb 10, 2026, 10:02 PM