font-maker

The easiest way to turn your custom fonts into files compatible with MapLibre GL (and Mapbox GL too).

For other prepared fonts, look at maplibre/demotiles/font instead.

For an example of using font-maker on the command line to cover as much of Unicode as possible, see the protomaps/basemaps-assets repository.

Usage

• Go to the web app at maplibre.org/font-maker/ and select your file.

• Wait for the progress bar to complete and download your ZIP containing all ranges for the font.

Installation

You don't need to install anything to create SDF fonts, just use the page above.

For command line usage and developing, see CONTRIBUTING.md

Caveats

If the MapLibre renderer does not find a matching codepoint in the current font, it will skip display of that character.

See @wipfli's Text Rendering in MapLibre guide for details on the drawbacks of mapping 1 codepoint to 1 glyph.

CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text

The font-maker demo app has local ideographs enabled which is the default for most MapLibre applications. Generated fonts that include CJK ranges will display system default fonts instead of generated fonts.

CTL (Complex Text Layout) scripts

Certain scripts cannot be rendered in MapLibre GL, affecting at least these languages:

• Burmese: OSM tag name:my
• Hindi name:hi
• Marathi name:mr
• Gujarati name:gu
• Punjabi name:pa, name:pnb
• Assamese name:as
• Bengali name:bn
• Oriya name:or
• Telugu name:te
• Kannada name:kn
• Tamil name:ta
• Malayalam name:ml

Labels using these scripts have been excluded from the sample capital cities dataset.

Discussion

Join the #maplibre slack channel at OSMUS: get an invite at https://slack.openstreetmap.us/