Feature Request: Support of variable-width fonts

[tinglar]

Right now, making a variable-width font with Usenti means manually marking the empty space between glyphs, which can be time-consuming and even error-prone. Trick automating this process, if possible, would be a big help.

[exelotl]

Hey, thanks for the suggestion! I think it's unlikely to be implemented in the way that you have in mind, because an automated approach for this during asset conversion is either going to give suboptimal results, or require manually overriding some of the values which would turn out to be just as fiddly as doing it by hand. For example, " " (space) and various punctuation symbols often need more or less padding than most alphanumeric characters, I find it easier to make those sorts of changes visually in a bitmap editor where I can see them.

I can imagine that using Usenti to create a font with the correct padding is very annoying, because Usenti is a very basic editor. You might be able to speed up your workflow using a more powerful editor like Aseprite or Gimp (Aseprite would definitely be my choice out of those two haha). During this stage I think calculating the width of glyphs automatically is a useful idea, and you could potentially write a plugin/script for your editor which does what you described, using the current grid size and canvas contents, to draw a bounding rectangle behind each glyph.

All that said, I would certainly like Trick to provide the same features as Usenti's export menu at some point in the future. I think this issue covers that, so I'll leave it open :)