Fonts and modifiers

A font here is not a Minecraft font. A chat message has no way to ask the client for a different typeface, so a font in this plugin is a table of code points: every letter the player typed is swapped for a glyph the client already knows how to draw. Welcome worn in SMALL CAPS reaches chat as ᴡᴇʟᴄᴏᴍᴇ — ordinary characters, delivered to everybody, with no resource pack anywhere.

A font touches the message body and nothing else. The tag, the name and the rank keep the letters they were written in, because a line where only half of it is in small capitals reads worse than either half whole.

What a font never rewrites

The table runs over the raw line before anything parses it, so everything that is an instruction rather than text is copied through exactly as written.

An unclosed <, an unclosed brace or a lone % is text, which is also how MiniMessage reads it.

The entry

fonts:
  small:
    category: classic
    name: '{primary}&lSMALL CAPS'
    alphabet: 'ᴀʙᴄᴅᴇғɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ'
    safe: true
    icon: PAPER
    description: 'The Exylia look, for your own words.'
    priority: 1
  wide:
    category: classic
    name: '{primary}&lWIDE'
    alphabet: 'ａｂｃｄｅｆｇｈｉｊｋｌｍｎｏｐｑｒｓｔｕｖｗｘｙｚＡＢＣＤＥＦＧＨＩＪＫＬＭＮＯＰＱＲＳＴＵＶＷＸＹＺ'
    digits: '０１２３４５６７８９'
    safe: true
    icon: BOOKSHELF
    description: 'Twice the space between every letter.'
    priority: 5

Everything else an entry may declare — category, name, icon, description, priority, permission, requirement, hidden, metadata — is the same as in every other file. See The catalogue.

The string form is what a copied alphabet looks like; the map form is for the odd extra character:

    map:
      '!': '❗'

An alphabet of any other length is reported with its path and skipped, and so are digits that are not ten and a map entry that is not one character to one glyph. An entry left with no glyphs at all is dropped with declares no glyphs, so this font changes nothing. The rest of the file still loads.

What safe means

safe: true says every glyph the font draws with is in the basic plane — the part of Unicode every client has a sheet for. safe: false says at least one is not: the mathematical alphabets that fraktur, script, monospace and the outline letters come from live above U+FFFF, and a client without them draws a box for each letter instead.

Twelve of the eighteen shipped fonts are safe: false. On a current Java client they are drawn from the fallback font and look fine. Bedrock clients and old ones are where they break.

The eighteen that ship

CLASSIC

Six fonts whose glyphs are all in the basic plane, which means the client draws them with its own font sheets, at the size of ordinary chat.

TYPESET

MODERN

SCRIPT

Every entry in TYPESET, MODERN and SCRIPT is safe: false; every entry in CLASSIC is safe: true.

Why CLASSIC reads differently

Two things decide how a font actually looks in chat, and the tab a font sits in is the honest signal of which one it got.

CLASSIC sits in the basic plane, and the client draws it with the same sheets the game uses for Greek, Cyrillic and every accented language. Crisp, small, and drawn on every client. Everything else lives in the mathematical alphabets, which the client pulls from its fallback font: wider, heavier and taller than the line around it. Legible and popular, but never as clean as CLASSIC — the letters do not match the chat they sit in, because they are not from the same font.

The alphabets that were left out

The squared alphabets — 🄰, 🅰 — are not shipped. Each glyph is a frame drawn around a letter, and at chat size a sentence of them is a wall of boxes rather than a font. They read as broken text, so they are not offered as a cosmetic. BUBBLE, which encloses in circles instead, is shipped and is one of the six that sit in the basic plane.

Modifiers

modifiers.yml is the shortest file in the set: five decorations in one tab, and no arithmetic anywhere.

modifiers:
  bold:
    category: style
    name: '{primary}&lBOLD'
    decoration: bold
    icon: IRON_BLOCK
    description: 'Say it louder.'
    priority: 1

decoration is the only key of its own, and it defaults to the entry's id — an entry named after the decoration it applies need not repeat it. Anything the five names above do not cover is reported and the entry is skipped.

Several at once

Modifiers are the one type worn as a set rather than in a single slot. A player may have bold and underlined on together, and clicking a modifier that is already worn takes it off rather than replacing it. Every other type — a tag, a font, a colour — holds one thing, and picking a second one replaces the first.

Wearing them

/cc fonts and /cc modifiers open the two browsers directly. Both also sit on the message menu, where a left click browses and a right click takes off whatever of that type is worn.

Ownership is the usual four nodes, with font or modifier as the type:

Grants work here as anywhere else, expiry included. See Entitlements.