Font

Fonts are used for rendering text in Minecraft. Several fonts are used in the game; the primary font used is known as either Mojangles or Minecraft Seven.

Multiple fonts can be defined and referenced with resource packs.

Fonts available

Java Edition

By default, Java Edition includes 4 fonts.

default

alt

uniform

illageralt

Bedrock Edition

In Bedrock Edition, there are 2 default fonts. Many other font resources are used regardless of the font setting. Unlike in Java Edition, the font can be swapped out with a built-in setting. The font can be changed in for touchscreens, or for controllers, and then the gear icon.

Mojangles

Noto Sans

Display modifications

Bold text

Bold text is rendered by drawing each character twice: once at its normal position and again one pixel to the right. This technique creates the appearance of thicker, bolder text without modifying the font itself.

Experience bar text

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The text on the experience bar is bright green Mojangles with a black outline.

Shadow

In most places text is rendered, a shadow appears beneath every character. This shadow is a copy of the character's glyph, with the red, green, and blue values divided by 4 and positioned 12.5% south-east of the character, relative to its spacing. Regardless of the resolution of the character's texture, the shadow is always moved by 12.5%. In the default font (assets/minecraft/textures/font/ascii.png), the shadow position is moved 1 pixel down and to the right.

For pixels where the glyph overlaps with the shadow, the above glyph's channels have 1 subtracted from them. For example, in areas where a white (#FFFFFF) glyph's pixel overlaps a shadow's, the white pixel becomes #FEFEFE.

Glowing text

Glow Ink Sac applied on a sign causes a character to create eight copies of itself in all eight directions. This results in the font appearing to have a thick outline. Glowing text always renders with an emissive texture, so it appears bright in darkness. The text takes priority over the outline; outlines appear below a character's pixels if they conflict. However, it is a rendering effect that does not actually emit any light. The player can use a black ink sac on the sign to remove the glow.

In a sign's block data, [NBT Compound / JSON Object] front_text or [NBT Compound / JSON Object] back_text's [Boolean] has_glowing_text controls whether the text glows.

Providers

This feature is exclusive to Java Edition.

 

A font is constructed from a list of providers, sources that provide characters to use. Different providers use different formats and methods of constructing characters. The default font uses all except for ttf.

A font file uses the following format:

Bitmap provider

The bitmap provider defines simple bitmap glyphs – glyphs from textures.

UTF-16 codepoints encoded in UTF-8 sequences can be used by use of surrogate pairs. To convert a character into a surrogate pair, one can use the following equations, where C is the codepoint in decimal:

• High Surrogate (first codepoint): ((C − 65536) − (C % 1024)) ÷ 1024 + 55296
• Low Surrogate (second codepoint): (C % 1024) + 56320

When the length of either chars or its strings is not a divisor of the resource's dimensions, it can result in an unexpected division of glyphs. The Unicode escape \u0000 can be used to add padding in the list. Padding acts as a "dummy character", so that the glyph data at that corresponding position in the file is not assigned a character.

Space provider

The space provider defines the width of a character's glyph.

By default, the game has two widths defined:

• U+0020 <SPACE> SPACE is 4
• U+200C <ZWNJ> ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER is 0

TTF provider

The ttf provider embeds already-compiled TrueType and OpenType fonts.^[a]

Unihex provider

The unihex provider is a replacement for the Legacy Unicode provider. It uses the GNU Unifont .hex format. It references a ZIP archive that contains a number of .hex files.

Reference provider

The reference provider serves one purpose: to include another provider only once. It can be used to include providers from other fonts in other resource packs.

Referenced providers are guaranteed to be loaded only once, no matter how many times they are included.

Legacy Unicode provider

This section describes content that has been removed from the game.

 

This feature was present in earlier versions of Minecraft, but has since been removed.

The legacy_unicode provider is similar to the bitmap provider in that it loads glyphs from only textures. This format is deprecated, and is prioritized only when the "Force Unicode Font" option is turned on. It acts as a "fallback" for glyphs that no other provider has defined a texture for.

Templates, specified by the template field, are name-based, and are all PNG files. Each template file must have equal width and height. The template numbering scheme works based off of the Unicode BMP. The number used is equal to a BMP codepoint's high byte.^[c][d] These template textures are called "pages". Template page "22" must cover characters U+2200 to U+22FF. Page numbers go from 00 to FF. Characters beyond U+FFFF cannot be changed through this provider. By default, each glyph is 16×16 pixels wide, so each individual template page is 256×256 pixels (16 glyphs on each line, 16 lines). Its default textures are an outdated version of GNU Unifont.^[1]

The file referenced by the sizes field must have the following format. Each character width is one byte large. The high nibble^[e] records the starting position, while the lower nibble records the ending position in the 16×16 glyph grid. For this reason, the file must be 0xFFFF bytes long (65535 in decimal).

A specific character's width is determined by finding its codepoints byte. The character 'A' has a codepoint of U+0041, so byte offset 0x41 (65 in decimal) would be addressed. A square character occupying the entire grid (pixel width #1 [0, 0x0] through #16 [15, 0xF]) would have a value of 0x0F (15 in decimal).

Widths cannot extend past 16 pixels, and characters whose codepoints are greater than U+FFFF are not handled. Some codepoints are invalid on their own. These are the surrogate pairs; they are used to encode codepoints higher than U+FFFF in UTF-16. This means that the template pages D8, D9, DA, DB, DC, DD, DE, and DF are invalid and cannot be used.

Emoji support

Minecraft has included textures for a number of emojis. The earliest emoji textures were for ☺☻. Since 1.15, this support has expanded. Emojis are monochromatic and behave just as any other character. The game does not support modifiers, such as skin tone, joining, or emoji presentation. The skin tone modifiers U+1F3FB..U+1F3FF 🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿 do not apply colored skin tones to their applicable emojis, and instead show tones as their Unifont glyphs. Joining multiple emojis via U+200D ‍ ZERO WIDTH JOINER to create 1 single emoji is not supported; multi-sequence emoji such as 👨‍👩‍👧 instead show as 👨‌👩‌👧 with dotted boxes showing ZWJ between them. Variation selectors, which control presentation, are displayed as dotted boxes with VSnumber.

For characters supported in the default font, as opposed to the fallback fonts, see Mojangles#Emoji.

Bedrock Edition does not support any character above U+FFFF, which includes many modern emoji. It does not include any textures for emojis below that either; only those provided by GNU Unifont below U+FFFF are included and visible.

Special characters

In Java Edition, there are 2 characters that are accessible only through technical means:

• The first is U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, which appears when either the U+FFFD character is typed, or there is an invalid UTF-8 multi-byte sequence.
• The second is the "notdef" character,^[f] seen when a character that has no texture in the currently-used font is typed. It is hardcoded and cannot be modified through resource packs. It is sometimes called "tofu" in the typographical community because of it resembles a block of tofu. More information on this character can be found at Missing textures and models#Missing font character.

In Bedrock Edition, a character with no texture data appears as a blank space. The U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER shown belongs to GNU Unifont.

History

This section is missing information about: Console Edition font info.

 

Please expand the section to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page.

Issues

Issues relating to "Font" are maintained on the bug tracker. Issues should be reported and viewed there.

Trivia

• Although not in the changelog or specification, the default copy of the unihex provider also includes a [NBT List / JSON Array] __ranges field in the [NBT Compound / JSON Object] entries of [NBT List / JSON Array] size_overrides. It is a list of strings, being the Unicode block names of the applying range.
• The New Nintendo 3DS Edition's font is a combination of the pre-1.12 JE font and some select characters from GNU Unifont. In addition, the ® sign was changed.

Gallery

• 
  Side-by-side comparison of glowing text versus normal text on a sign.
• 
  Formatted text in a book.
• 
  Formatted text in chat.
• 
  The collection of the emojis in Java Edition.
• 
  A diagram of typography terms and their relation to the font.
• 
  Example of how multi-sequence emojis do not render correctly. This is the emoji 👨‍👩‍👧. The [ZWJ] are U+200D ‍ ZERO WIDTH JOINER
• 
  Side-by-side comparison of � and the notdef character.
• 
  The 43 supported emojis as they appear in-game.

See also

• Language
• Resource packs#Fonts
• Sign

Notes

References

External links

• GNU Unifont

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