Proposal - Custom font support

[Zybyte85]

I see that in the assets folder there is font files. So is there a way to to make it so in the settings you can change it by getting another font file? I already tried just renaming my file to CozetteVector and putting it in the assets folder, which worked just fine, it is just a bit weird to have to do that.

Edit: This could also probably be done really easily with the cursor file, as it seems to be handled in a similar way of just grabbing from the file, although it would probably be a lot more complex with different sizes and getting it to work right.

(Love the program btw lowkey thinking about learning Zig just to help with it)

[foxnne]

Great suggestion! I hadn't thought about allowing different fonts but there's not really any reason it shouldn't be allowed.

[foxnne]

DVUI supports this, and this will be easily supported by pixi. I just haven't implemented the theme editor yet, but once it's in, it will allow loading and using custom fonts.

[ZackeryRSmith]

I’m wondering if we could expand this issue into a broader discussion on general theming support, specifically for custom fonts and colors. In my experience with PixTTF, dvui.Theme didn't feel flexible enough. To solve this, I moved to a custom JSON structure (example below) that defines a palette and metadata. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this approach or if you already have some other idea in mind.

{
  "name": "Classic Dark",
  "author": "ZackeryRSmith",
  "version": "1.0",
  "license": "MIT",
  "source": "https://github.com/ZackeryRSmith/pixttf/blob/main/src/themes/classic_dark.json",
  "pallet": {
    "bg_app": "#3a4856",
    "bg_panel": "#5b6978",
    "bg_panel_alt": "#488cbf",
    "bg_panel_dark": "#1d242b",
    "grid_bg": "#323f4d",
    "border_focus": "#6d88a2",
    "accent": "#488cbf"
  }
}

[foxnne]

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this approach or if you already have some other idea in mind.

I was thinking about this earlier and I think it might end up needing to be the case, where we need more data than we can store in a DVUI theme. I am about to merge a PR that adds persistent theme to settings, as well as font sizes for the DVUI theme fonts, which also persist. This un-ties the font sizes from the Theme's as I think we would want (user would want all themes to use their font sizes).

Theme's already support embedding fonts within them, but we would also want to be able to offer selecting system fonts, which I think DVUI has lightly started but not completely added. I do think it would be nice to attach palettes to themes for arbitrary colors, but maybe this could be built in to themes as metadata?

I had hoped I could solve our theming without needing to move away from DVUI's Theme, as I would prefer all DVUI themes be directly compatible with Pixi. But if need be we can certainly move away from it.