Tinsel

aka Tools to Implement Negative Spacing for Elegant Layouts

Tinsel is a library for Minecraft Java servers to do fun things with text, using negative-space fonts and glyphs with extreme vertical ascents.

It's made up of two parts:

• A server-side library to generate Adventure components
• A resource pack containing high-ascent and negative-spacing fonts, shipped as both a prebuilt zip file, and a Gradle plugin to generate ascent fonts from your own resources

Either can be used independently, but work best when both used together.

Usage

Tinsel is still very work-in-progress and not yet production-ready. Once the API is more stable, I'll write some proper docs, but the example server is a good place to start until then.

1. Install the resource pack by running gradle :example:pack:build and copying example/pack/build/distributions/tinsel-example-pack.zip into your client.
   • Alternatively, set the MINECRAFT_RESOURCE_PACKS_FOLDER environment variable to your client's RP folder and run gradle :example:pack:copyToMinecraft. This is helpful for local pack development.
   • You will need to copy some vanilla assets into the project to build the pack - see resources/src/main/fontBitmaps/minecraft/font/readme.txt. This will be automated eventually.
2. Start the test plugin server with gradle :example:plugin:runServer.
3. Use the /tinsel command to trigger examples and see how they work.