Bitmap Font Editor vs Fontra

Bitmap Font Editor is a free desktop tool for creating monochrome bitmap fonts, particularly for retro computers and embedded targets such as the SAM Coupe. It supports fixed-width and variable-width fonts, with adjustable advance width for each glyph. Users draw glyphs in cells up to 32×32 pixels by clicking or dragging to paint and erase; draggable font guides and pinned reference glyphs are also available. Editing tools include undo, redo, copy, paste, clear, invert, flip, and shift. An editable sample text preview offers three zoom levels and white-on-black or black-on-white display. Raw font bitmaps can be imported with settings for starting codepoint, geometry, and byte layout. Projects use the losslessly round-trippable .fnt.json format. Export produces a 1bpp bitmap plus JSON sidecar files for widths and character mapping. Release 0.1.3 offers Windows, macOS, and Linux builds, with SHA-256 checksums. The source is MIT-licensed. Windows and macOS builds are unsigned, and system-font filling is disabled because Canvas 2D lacks TrueType hinting access.

Fontra is a free, open-source browser-based font editor designed around variable fonts. It was initially developed to make designing and producing large CJK fonts more efficient. Its architecture combines a JavaScript browser client and Python server, which can run locally or remotely. Fontra Pak bundles the application for desktop use and local file editing; a remote server setup allows real-time collaboration among users, with changes propagating across windows. The project supports reading and writing Designspace and UFO files, as well as reading and exporting TTF and OTF files, including variable fonts. Editing features include live text entry, designspace axis navigation, interpolation, OpenType features, outline editing, components, anchors, guidelines, background images, transformations, kerning, font metadata and variation-axis mapping. Fontra Pak has binaries for macOS 11 and newer, Windows 10 and newer, and Ubuntu x86_64. Linux users can also use Flatpak or Snap; source compilation is listed for other architectures such as ARM or PPC. The repository is licensed under GPL-3.0.