Fonts

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Fonts

By default a HUD uses no font file at all. Glyphs come from the vanilla bitmap sheets bundled in the plugin, so the text matches what the player already sees everywhere else and the pack stays small. You only need a font file for a look of your own, or for a script vanilla does not cover.

Drop a .ttf or .otf into plugins/HUDEngine/fonts/ and name it in texts/:

fancy:
  file: consolas.ttf
  scale: 8
  merge-default-bitmap: false
  include:
    - russia

The file line is what actually puts the font to work. Dropping a TTF into fonts/ does nothing on its own — an entry in texts/ has to name it. Nothing about the result says otherwise: the text still renders, in the vanilla font, looking exactly as it did before. The engine warns about a font file that nothing names:

WARN: fonts/font.ttf: is not used by anything. A font file is only drawn from once an entry in
texts/ names it, for example "file: font.ttf"

Key	What it does
file	a file in fonts/. Omit it to use vanilla glyphs only
scale	glyph height in pixels. 8 is the size vanilla draws at
merge-default-bitmap	true (default) uses vanilla glyphs first and lets the file fill only what they do not cover — right when the point is a missing script. false draws every character from the file — right when the point is a different look
include	which scripts to build into the pack, on top of what your patterns already use

Known include names: russia, greece, japan, china, korean, thailand, hebrew, arab, hindi, bengal, cyrillic-full.

What ends up in the pack

Anything you type straight into a pattern is built in automatically, whatever alphabet it is in. Writing pattern: "Привет [health]" gives you those letters with no further configuration — they are in the config, so there is no reason to declare them twice.

include is for characters that only turn up while the server runs, which cannot be known when the pack is built:

• what a placeholder returns — a player name, a rank, a quest title
• what another plugin publishes through the API
• text from a language file you have not written into a pattern

So a HUD whose Russian is all written in the configs needs nothing. A HUD that shows [papi:player_title], and the titles are Russian, needs include: russia.

pack.extra-chars in config.yml does the same for individual symbols outside any alphabet: "⚔✦❤".

russia is the living Cyrillic alphabet. cyrillic-full is the whole Unicode block including Old Church Slavonic, which almost nobody needs and which forces a font file for glyphs vanilla has no answer for.

What survives eight pixels

scale: 8 is the size Minecraft draws its own font at, and it is small — a letter is eight pixels tall and a stroke is either one pixel wide or absent. This is worth knowing before you pick a font, because it decides which ones can work at all:

• Monospace and UI faces survive. Consolas, JetBrains Mono, DejaVu Sans Mono: even strokes, simple shapes, nothing that depends on fine detail.
• Display faces do not. A graffiti, script or heavily ornamented font is chosen for detail that has nowhere to go at this size, and it comes out as a smudge. That is not the plugin failing — there is no rendering trick that fits a serif flourish into one pixel.

If a decorative font is the point, raise scale so it has more pixels to live in, and look at it in game before committing to it.

Reading the compile report

Every font gets a line in the console when the pack is built:

font default   vanilla=0 overrides=4 file=260 unavailable=4

Column	Meaning
vanilla	glyphs taken from the bundled vanilla sheets
overrides	glyphs replaced by the engine's own corrections
file	glyphs rasterised from your TTF
unavailable	characters nothing could draw; they will be missing on screen

unavailable is not always a problem. A script is a whole Unicode range and a font may genuinely lack the rarest characters in it. It is a problem when the characters listed are ones your HUD actually uses.

If the line reads the vanilla sheets covered everything; this font needs no file, you can delete the font file and the file: key — it is doing nothing.