This web application was created by Electra, you can message me on Discord at @electraminer It was made to allow easy communication using alternative writing scripts in Minecraft. You can create banners of the symbols you need and save them to type quickly.
The app is currently hosted on https://banner-writer.web.app. You can use this page to write your banners. You can use the URL parameter writing=BANNERFONT to open the page with banners already loaded. URLs with the path /image/BANNERFONT will return an image of banners.
BannerFont is a Unicode representation of banners using the Private User Area. You can use this standard to represent banners
in your own programs if needed, as well as to interface with Banner Writer via its API.
A banner is represented using unicode character EXYY where X is the color, in hex, and Y is the pattern, in BCD.
You can look at the Color.ts and Pattern.ts files for a full list of these values with numbers, or check the order on the site.
The pattern 00 represents the background of a banner.
Banner patterns are separated by unicode character CFFF7, representing a negative space (so the banner patterns are overlayed)
A space can be represented by either a space (unicode 20) or an underscore (unicode 5F). The underscore is preferred when creating URLs.
A newline must be represented by the character E00A, followed by a whitespace of some kind (either a space, an underscore, /n, or /r/n). This special character is used to differentiate spaces from newlines in URLs, where spaces cannot be used.
Since banners can be used to write many langugaes, they can either be used left-to-right or right-to-left. While writing BannerFont, you should always write each line from left-to-right, as this is how it will render when displayed as text. You can prefix the text with E00D for LTR or E00E for RTL to mark the direction, to aid special rendering/editing programs like this.
You can mark the end of BannerFont with E00F. This is optional but can be used to separate BannerFont from other scripts in a message.
If you want to develop the app and run the server using Firebase, you can just run npm start, which builds the app and launches a Firebase emulator.
If you prefer to run the server without Firebase, you can use npm run build and then start the Express server at ts-build/src/backend/index.js.