ILILOVEPIE·May 9, 2026Submission
1 points · Open discussionopentypejs
opentype.js
JavaScript2014–2026
opentypejs / opentype.js
opentype.js
Read and write OpenType fonts using JavaScript.
6Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Read and write OpenType fonts using JavaScript.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-04-24 19:06:26 UTC to 2026-05-09 00:25:57 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesIt could be done with opentype.js, but sadly it doesn't support `calt` GSUB type: https://github.com/opentypejs/opentype.js/issues/443
That said, we can have Notepad with built-in syntax highlighting now! https://fosstodon.org/@niutech/113028194839365739
In Font with Built-In Syntax HighlightingI did a bunch of work with extracting info from fonts for a site I built last year [1], a useful tool to know about if you want to do something like this yourself (e.g. automating extraction of data from fonts) is ttx [2] from the fonttools package (available for Python and also a CLI tool which can be brew installed), which can dump out all of the tables in the font (which is where all the information about the glyphs and variations etc. is stored) to XML. There’s a lot of data (fonts are amazingly complex things with all the OpenType features, variable support [3] etc) and the structure takes some working out, but it’s all in there!
There’s also opentype.js [4] which can do similar on the client side, I’m not sure if there’s some info that you can only get from ttx or if opentype.js exposes all the same information off the top of my hea
Read the rest
d.
Finally, Fontforge [5] is an OSS font editor which can be useful for inspecting the glyphs in a font visually etc.
[1] https://f37foundry.com
[2] https://fonttools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ttx.html
[3] https://f37foundry.com/playground has some fun examples of what you can do creatively with variable fonts (best on desktop)
[4] https://github.com/opentypejs/opentype.js
[5] https://fontforge.org/en-US/
Definitely raise an issue: https://github.com/nodebox/opentype.js/issues
In Opentype.js: read and write OpenType fonts using JavaScriptPlumin is a light wrapper around paper.js [1] and my opentype.js library[2], which can parse and write OpenType fonts in pure JavaScript.
Plumin is nice to build fonts from scratch. If you're interested in taking an existing font and manipulating its shape or metrics, consider using opentype.js directly.
[1] http://paperjs.org/
[2] https://github.com/nodebox/opentype.js
In Create and manipulate fonts using JavaScriptI have an interest in helping out. I've created opentype.js, an OpenType parser and generator (https://github.com/nodebox/opentype.js).
I understand your concern for keeping the format declarative, but I'm not entirely sure you can handle TTF files that way, as you'll run into walls very quickly.
For example, to know the number of entries in the `loca` table, you have to parse the `numGlyphs` field from the `maxp` table. The `maxp` table doesn't have to come first...
In Show HN: Binspector – A Binary Format Analysis ToolA JavaScript parser for TrueType and OpenType fonts
2 points · Open discussion