Brutalita

Brutalita is an experimental font and font editor, edit in your browser and download OTF.

The name means "little brutal" in spanish. Made with SVG and Opentype.JS

• Download Brutalita: https://brutalita.com/Brutalita-400.otf

CLI

Compile a font source to .otf without opening the editor. The source is the same JSON the editor exports — { "config": {...}, "chars": {...} } — where each glyph is a list of polylines on a 2×4 half-step grid.

pnpm dlx brutalita build my-font.json -o MyFont.otf

With no source argument it looks for ./font.json, then ./src/font.json, then falls back to the copy of Brutalita bundled with the CLI.

Commands

| Command | What it does | | --- | --- | | build | Compile a font source to .otf | | render | Render text to a single-stroke .svg | | validate | Check a font source for errors | | info | Describe a font source, or read a built .otf back | | init | Create a starter font source | | watch | Rebuild whenever the source changes |

Run brutalita help <command> for the full option list.

# every weight at once, into a directory
brutalita build src/font.json -d public -w all --filename "Brutalita-{weight}.{ext}"

# pipe the bytes somewhere else
brutalita build src/font.json -w 700 -o - > Bold.otf

# a specimen image
brutalita render src/font.json -t "Hello\nWorld" --background "#111" --width 800 -o hello.svg

# check a font you are editing by hand
brutalita validate my-font.json --strict
brutalita info my-font.json

Diagnostics always go to stderr, so --out - and --json stay pipeable. Exit codes: 0 success, 1 usage or I/O error, 2 invalid font source.

Reproducible builds

opentype.js stamps head.created and head.modified with the current time, so two builds of an unchanged source differ. Pass --timestamp to pin both and get byte-identical output:

brutalita build src/font.json -o Brutalita.otf --timestamp 2024-01-01

Development

pnpm dev         # the editor at localhost:3000
pnpm cli         # run the CLI from source
pnpm fonts       # regenerate public/Brutalita-{300,400,700}.otf
pnpm cover       # regenerate the banner above
pnpm test        # unit tests + golden font/SVG regression tests
pnpm typecheck
pnpm build:cli   # bundle the CLI to dist/cli/brutalita.mjs

The CLI bundles to a single dependency-free file, so dist/cli/brutalita.mjs is the only thing published. The font-building core (src/font-maker.ts, src/svg-export.ts, src/font-validate.ts) is shared with the browser editor and stays free of DOM access.