Calligro
A downloadable tool for Windows and Linux
Calligro lets you generate custom fonts from images created in graphics software like Gimp, Photoshop, Aseprite and others.
The workflow is as follows:
- generate a Calligro template (which is a .png or .aseprite image)
- draw your characters in the template in any graphics editor
- load the filled template back into Calligro and save a bitmap font
This tool is open source. You can find the source code on GitHub. I also maintain a web version at calligro.ideasalmanac.com. It has the same core feature but the offline version is a bit more convenient.
Calligro generates fonts in the BMFont format. A lot of game engines and frameworks support it out of the box. This includes Godot, Phaser.js, LibGDX, Heaps.io, HaxeFlixel and others.
You can also generate non-monospace fonts but some frameworks don't seem to support it (Godot is confirmed to support it).
Be sure to check out the official written tutorial or just watch the video tutorial instead:
Feel free to join the Ideas Almanac Discord Server to get help or share your work.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Oyster Mushroom - Video Tutorial & Various Improvements6 days ago
- Shiitake Edition - Migrated to a new backend45 days ago
- Hot Reload Aseprite Templates81 days ago
- Aseprite Support & Discord Server98 days ago
- Calligro 2Jul 19, 2025
- New Update & Official Tutorial Now AvailableDec 02, 2024
- Template saving bug fixJun 28, 2023
- File loading bug fixJun 14, 2023
Comments
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Hey! Great tool! I tried it a little bit as web app. However, upon starting the app on Fedora (Gnome, Wayland), I get this error: "Error 71 (Protocol error) dispatching to Wayland display."
The app then immediately closes.
Any ideas?
Hi! I launched it on Fedora with Wayland and unfortunately couldn't reproduce the issue myself. The issue is probably caused by this bug in Tauri (a library Calligro uses).
Would you mind trying to launch Calligro with the following environmental variables set?
In other words launch it using this command:
Let me know if that helped
Hey, and thanks for the reply. Unfortunately that didn't help. I can run the app on another fedora machine without nvidia, so there's no panic for my part. But let me know if you want me to try something else on this machine, or if the bug is fixed in Tauri.
This looks great (tried the web version a bit) but when I run the Linux version I get a blank window. This happens on two different machines, one Fedora 43 and one Arch Linux. If you want I can open an issue on github.
Thanks!
Thanks for letting me know. No need to create an issue, I'm working on it
Just to let you know, the newest version (2.3.0) should work properly on Linux
Thanks, it's working fine!
Hello, thank you for publishing this tool. I have a question, do you know of a software that can convert fonts created with Calligro into web font, or at least into some format that can be converted into web font?
I'm looking to create pixel-perfect pixel art font for an HTML game and so creating a bitmap font first seems the easiest way (if that's even possible), and I'm not sure if Calligro will be of help there.
I don't think it's possible to do it in a way that would let you use it in HTML/CSS.
But you can display a bitmap font in <canvas> using, for example, pixi.js or phaser
There is no way to add the space character back once it was removed
Thank you, the issue has been fixed in the latest release
:D
Hold on...there's a font type out there that allows for COLOR on a per character basis?! I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this here program...
In the Templates section, the Save Template button does not respond. All the fields are filled. Windows-64 version.
Thanks for the report. The issue is now fixed
Thanks for the fast fix.