The complete opposite of a font

Tofu

For the curious, this is font-manager

What is this?

This is an attempt by me to make a font (collection) that is just a box with the unicode code point inside. These are usually not in a font but rather programmatically generated by programs as they encounter characters that have no associated glyph.

Why?

Because I wanted zero width characters in my code to be not zero width. I was trying out vss code (pretty nice imo) and found I should be able to use some CSS magic to make it so that certain characters are displayed by this font. (see also)

Things that need to get fixed

• It’s not very readable when small. Make better tofu template
• The size of the generated font collection can probably be made smaller (for example by excluding unassigned characters)
• The progress bar isn’t smooth since the fontforge lib provides no way to measure its progress when loading the generated .sfd files

This is stupid

Yeah probably, but for its very specific use case it’s not terribly bad.

Generating a font

Caching should take care of the intensive IO issue, if not then use a ramdisk.

I used python3 for this, it may work in python2. If it does not please feel free to make a pull request to fix it but I am not actively supporting python2.

The syntax for the program is as follows. gen_tofu.py 0000-FFFD [10000-1FFFF] [-s X]
0000 is the start of the first range
FFFD is the end of the first range
10000 is the start of the second range (optional, you can use as many ranges as you want)
1FFFF is the end of the second range (optional)
X is the number of characters that each font will contain (optional)

License

MIT, not sure if the font needs a special license. ▯