Font Baker

Godot 4 editor plugin that bakes MSDF glyph atlases from TTF/OTF/TTC/OTC fonts.

The baked .tres/.res resource contains only the glyph cache (textures + metrics), allowing text rendering without distributing the original font file. This is useful for CJK fonts with restrictive licenses that prohibit embedding.

How It Works

1. Load a TTF/OTF/TTC/OTC font and enable MSDF rendering
2. Render the selected character ranges into glyph atlas textures
3. Remap glyph indices from FreeType IDs to Unicode code points
4. Save as a FontFile resource (.tres or compressed .res) with cache data only, no font binary

Godot's TextServer already supports "no font data" mode where glyphs are looked up directly from cache, so the baked resource works as a drop-in replacement.

Installation

Copy the addons/font_baker/ directory into your Godot project's addons/ folder, then enable the plugin in Project > Project Settings > Plugins.

Usage

1. Open the Font Baker dock panel (bottom-left by default)
2. Select a source TTF/OTF/TTC/OTC font (font collections will show a face selector)
3. Choose an output path (.res for compressed binary, .tres for text)
4. Adjust MSDF settings if needed (Pixel Range, MSDF Size)
5. Select character sets to include
6. Optionally load a text file to extract used characters
7. Click Bake

Character Set Presets

JIS Level 1/2 code points are sourced from the Unicode Consortium JIS X 0208 mapping.

Limitations

• No HarfBuzz shaping (ligatures, contextual alternation) in baked output. CJK text is unaffected since it uses 1:1 character-to-glyph mapping.
• Ideographic Variation Sequences (IVS) are not supported without FreeType.
• The baked font works at any display size thanks to MSDF, but cannot be re-rasterized at a different MSDF source size.

License

MIT