bited BDF

Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF) is bited's font format of choice.

Why BDF?

Upon reading the Wikipedia entry for BDF, you might get the impression that BDF is an obsolete font format. And while BDF is pretty old -- after all, it was released in 1987 -- it's still perfectly usable! Sure, it may not have the fancy Opentype features of more modern formats, but BDF has plenty going for it.

Human-readable: You can open up a BDF in your text editor of choice and directly edit it.
Computer-readable: The BDF structure is very simple and diff-friendly, which is great when you want to build tools that can read or edit BDFs.
Compatibility: BDFs are plug-and-play on systems that support them (e.g. Linux). Most bitmap fonts that you can find online use BDFs as either source or distribution.

BDF Spec Extensions

bited's extensions to the BDF format occur exclusively as custom properties prefixed with BITED_. This makes bited BDFs fully compatible with the X Consortium's BDF 2.1 spec. In other words, you can use bited BDFs as-is anywhere you can use regular BDFs.

`BITED_DWIDTH`

Default font-wide dwidth. Corresponds to FONT > default dimensions > w: in the Settings Menu.

`BITED_TABLE_WIDTH`

Corresponds to DISPLAY > table columns.

`BITED_TABLE_CELL_SCALE`

Corresponds to DISPLAY > table cell scale.

`BITED_EDITOR_GRID_SIZE`

Corresponds to DISPLAY > editor grid size.

`BITED_EDITOR_CELL_SIZE`

Corresponds to DISPLAY > editor cell size.

`glyphs.toml`

One limitation of the BDF format is that there is no spec-compliant way to store custom per-glyph data. To work around this, bited interfaces with a TOML file colocated with the BDF that follows the pattern {bdf_basename}.glyphs.toml. Like BDF, this file is intended for both human and computer consumption.

Warning

Whenever you rename your BDF, you must also rename the corresponding glyphs.toml to ensure bited can find it.

`glyphs.<name>`

This table contains glyph-specific values. Glyphs not specified here will derive values from the default table.

`is_abs: bool`

Whether the glyph is in offset mode (false) or dwidth mode (true).

`default`

This table contains fallback values for glyphs not specified in the glyphs table.

Key	Default Value
`is_abs`	`true`