Bitmap Font Editor

Glyph editor

Row above

Column
left

Column
right

Row below

Columns Rows

Zoom

Shift pixels:

Click a pixel to toggle it; drag to draw or erase.

Show shadow of default font

Guidelines

Drag the triangle handles in the editor's margins to move guidelines; double-click a margin to add one there. The baseline sets the ascent and descent in exported fonts.

Whole font

Change default font

The default font is shown as a shadow in the editor and is used by "Use default". Choose a new one below; it takes effect when you press one of the buttons.

Use a built-in bitmap font

Font

The X11 "misc-fixed" fonts (public domain) and SGI's X11 "Screen" fonts (RetroUnix). Their pixels are used unchanged: centered across the columns, with their baseline on the baseline guideline; pixels outside the character are cut off.

Use a system font

Family

Size

Threshold

Draw at pixel size

A font installed on this computer, drawn into the current character size with the settings above.

Characters

Scale Show reference characters

Click a character to edit it. You can also type a character, or use the arrow keys, to select it.

Sample text

Rendered sample

Scale

Drag the bottom-right corner of the dashed box to change its width; lines wrap to fit.

Using the exported font

TrueType (.ttf): each pixel becomes a square in a scalable outline font, so the font can be installed like any other font.

Install: double-click the file on Windows or macOS; on Linux copy it to ~/.local/share/fonts and run fc-cache.
VSCode: set "editor.fontFamily" (and "terminal.integrated.fontFamily") to the font name. For sharp pixels, set "editor.fontSize" to the row count or a multiple of it (the row count is the font's em height).
Windows Terminal: Settings, then a profile, then Appearance, then Font face.
Command Prompt (classic console window): it only offers fonts listed under the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont. Add a string value named 000 (or 0000, etc., if taken) whose data is the font name, then sign out and back in.

BDF (.bdf): a plain-text bitmap font format (Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format) used by X11 and many terminal emulators. FontForge and tools such as bdf2psf can convert it to other formats, such as the Linux console's PSF format.

The font uses the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character set. Your work is saved automatically in this browser.