toki pona fonts for GB Studio

Click the download button at the top or bottom of the page to get the fonts. Do not download the preview images on this page. They will not work properly.

Ever wanted to make a GB Studio game with sitelen pona? 󱥫󱥁󱤡󱥞󱤘󱥉󱤀! These fonts are made to slot in to any GB Studio project; just drag and drop them to your game's assets/fonts folder, then select them from Settings > UI Elements within your project.

There are two fonts here (so far):

• pona-variable-width is, as the name implies, variable width.
• pona-mono is monospaced.

These fonts also include the letters of the Latin alphabet that are represented in toki pona: A, E, I, O, U, J, K, L, M, N, P, S, T, and W (as well as lowercase variants). Other letters will not work and will come out as various sitelen pona. If you want to be able to type other letters, you will need to switch to another font by typing !F into the dialogue box inside of GB Studio.

There are also two Python scripts included. Which one you want to use depends on how you type toki pona. If you want to simply type in Latin characters, use sitelen-Lasina-to-GB-ASCII.py. If you want to type in sitelen pona using the UCSUR method, use UCSUR-to-GB-ASCII.py.

• Note that using the UCSUR script will also let you include Latin letters within your input and they'll come through unscathed, but if you use the sitelen Lasina script, any strings that make up valid toki pona words will be converted even if you didn't want them to be. (This includes the letters a, e, o, and n.) If you're using the sitelen Lasina script I'd recommend just converting your toki pona, then manually typing any Latin letters you want into the dialogue box in GB Studio directly.

These fonts include:

• All nimi pu and nimi ku suli characters
• Variants for sewi, namako, ni, meli and mije, and mani (this last one is just a version I use when handwriting and probably won't be used by anyone else)
• • Type 󱥚1 or sewi1 for the religious version, and just 󱥚 or sewi for the secular version.
  • Type 󱥸1 or namako1 for the sin-inspired version, and just 󱥸 or namako for the pepper version.
  • For the directional ni variants, type 󱥁u, 󱥁l, 󱥁r, 󱥁nw, 󱥁ne, 󱥁sw, and 󱥁se or ni-u, ni-l, ni-r, ni-nw, ni-ne, ni-sw, and ni-se. Simply 󱥁 or ni will render the downward version.
  • Type ♀/meli1 and ♂/mije1 for the gender symbols; type 󱤳/meli and 󱤵/mije for the sitelen pona.
  • Finally, type 󱤲1 or mani1 for my bespoke mani glyph, or simply 󱤲/mani for the sitelen pona you're probably used to.
• Some uncommon words that I just happen to like; you'll need to type these in sitelen Lasina, even when using the UCSUR script:
• • linluwi: Internet, digital, connected, net, weave
  • eliki: Immutable characteristics about oneself that cause distress, but are not necessarily ike or pakala. Disability, dysphoria, that sort of thing.
  • su: A series of illustrated story books by jan Sonja Lang, or to interact with said books.
  • molusa: Molluscs and related animals such as snails, slugs, octopi, squids, etc.

To run the script:

You'll need something that can run Python. If you're experienced with coding you probably already know how to do that; if not, try out Thonny. Open the script in the app and hit the Run button. You'll get a prompt to enter a phrase. Do so and push Enter, and it will spit out some output that looks like mojibake. Paste that output into a Display Dialogue event in GB Studio.

• Note that some characters may not display in the dialogue box preview in GB Studio for technical reasons; however, if you compile and run the game, they will render properly.

If you edit the script in a way that breaks it (no judgment, I've been there many times over the last 48 hours), just redownload from here and it should work again.

Make it your own!

If you don't like the combined 󱥬‍󱥔/toki pona glyph, feel free to remove line 186 from the UCSUR-to-GB-ASCII script/line 30 from the sitelen-Lasina-to-GB-ASCII script.

If you make your own toki pona fonts for GB Studio, feel free to use these scripts. Note that you'll have to put your glyphs in the same spots in your fonts as I did in mine for it to work, unless you're comfortable editing the scripts.

Many thanks to:

• jan Sonja Lang for the invention of toki pona and sitelen pona
• The wider toki pona community for being so friendly and helping me learn this language
• Chris Maltby and the rest of the GB Studio dev team for maintaining this wonderful program
• The GB Studio Discord server for helping me work out the kinks with these fonts, especially Clockwork Prince, toxa, and gud_graphics

You can use these fonts and scripts in any project, commercial or otherwise, as long as you don't claim to have made them yourself. Credit is appreciated but not required.