Providers

Providers are the core part of Minecraft fonts. Providers are discrete components that individually map characters to glyphs. They are isolated and don't normally interact with each other, so they are easily removed, added, swapped, and modified.

In mcfonts, providers are given a high degree of independence and inversion of control: implementations decide the specific best way to do something from a broad range of possibilities.

Different providers use different formats and methods of constructing characters.

The types are:

• Bitmap provider
• Legacy Unicode provider
• Notdef provider
• Reference provider
• Space provider
• TTF provider
• Unihex provider

In JSON

Providers are specified inside of a font's JSON file. Each item of the root's providers array is a provider object.

A font is essentially a list of providers, both conceptually and literally.

Providers are chiefly identified by the value of the type field. It is always present on all provider objects; if an item in the providers array lacks this key, then it is not a valid provider.

Below is a simple example with one provider with a filter applied:

{
    "providers": [
        {
            "type": "space",
            "filter": {
                "jp": false
            },
            "advances": {
                " ": 4,
                "\u200c": 0,
                "a": -8
            }
        }
    ]
}

The single provider happens to be the space provider, one of the more simple ones, although any provider could be in its place (and any number of them could exist in this array).

This specific provider has only one provider-specific field: advances. It is an object, with keys of characters matching to values of space width.

In this instance:

• U+0020 SPACE has a width of 4

• U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER (ZWNJ) has a width of 0

• U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A has a width of -8

The remaining filter field declares that this provider will only be active when the value of the Japanese Glyph Variants button in-game is OFF.

Filters

Filters are settings that define when a provider is "enabled". It is optional, but supported for any provider.

Fig. 1 The in-game options found in Language ‣ Font Settings

It defines when a provider should be considered part of a font. The filter's keys and values correspond to the names and states of specific buttons in Minecraft.

• If true, its button value must be ON.

• If false, its button value must be OFF.

• If undefined, its button value is ignored.

Filter options are currently hard-coded. They are:

• jp: linked to Japanese Glyph Variants

• uniform: linked to Force Uniform

Example

This filter cause its provider to only be active when both Force Uniform is ON and Japanese Glyph Variants is ON:

{
    "type": "..."
    "filter": {
        "uniform": true,
        "jp": true,
    }
}

Reference filter merging

Filters can also be set on reference providers. If so, mcfonts will apply the reference's filter on top of the targeted providers'.

For example:

Reference Targetted Result

{
    "type": "reference",
    "id": "...",
    "filter": {
        "uniform": false
    }
}

{
    "type": "space",
    "advances": {},
    "filter": {
        "uniform": true,
        "jp": true,
    }
}

{
    "type": "space",
    "advances": {},
    "filter": {
        "uniform": false,
        "jp": true
    }
}

Here, the uniform option was overridden during the merge (reference defined it as false), while jp remained, unmodified (reference did not define it either way).

Priority

Priority is a ranking of order for each provider type. The higher a provider's priority is, the more important and more control it will generally have, This control ranges from being used first for glyph mappings, or called later in some saving process.

For instance, in OpenType saving, higher priority providers are saved last to allow them to make changes to the data other providers have made.

The current priority order for the included providers is:

• 5 Notdef

• 4 Space

• 3 Bitmap

• 2 TTF

• 1 Unihex

• 0 Legacy unicode

API

mcfonts.provider.Provider

2026 April 22