Minecraft GUI Designer

Custom chest menus, HUD overlays and dialogs are built from resource pack glyphs - characters whose texture is your image. This editor places them for you and shows what the client will draw, down to the pixel.

The loop this replaces

Guess an offset. Rebuild the pack. Restart the client. Look. Guess again. A single chest menu can take an afternoon that way, and the part you are actually designing, where the icon sits and how wide the title is, never gets any easier.

The editor cuts that loop at the first step: you see the result while you place things, because the preview and the export go through the same layout code. If the canvas shows the icon three pixels left of the slot, the pack will too.

What it produces

Everything the game needs, from one design:

• a resource pack with the font providers and your textures, with the right pack.mcmeta for your version
• the text component that puts the design on screen - JSON, MiniMessage, or a Java snippet for a Paper plugin
• or, if you run a glyph plugin, the configuration for Nexo, Oraxen, CraftEngine or ItemsAdder

Why the preview can be trusted

Because it is not a drawing of what the client probably does. The character widths come from the client's own font files, the HUD anchors from measurement runs against a real client, and the version profiles read their pack_format out of the jar instead of a table someone typed.

Where something is not measured, the editor says so instead of guessing. A version that was never calibrated inherits from the nearest one and is marked as unverified; a surface whose timing nobody measured says that in plain words.

What it warns about before you export

Most of what breaks a design in game is invisible while you draw it. The editor checks for it as you go:

• a glyph whose ascent is larger than its box - the client rejects the whole font, not just that glyph
• bold text, which widens spaces as well and quietly pushes a design past its frame
• italic text that is moved vertically: the client shears it from the baseline, so it drifts sideways by a quarter pixel per pixel
• a dialog body that wraps, because the client breaks the line one pixel earlier than you would expect
• glyphs that hang below the line and collide with the next row in chat or on the scoreboard

Versions

Minecraft 1.21 through 26.x. Two versions are calibrated end to end, the two ends of that range, and everything between inherits from the nearest calibrated one and is marked accordingly. Version-dependent features are part of the version profile, not an if somewhere in the editor: with a lower bound below 1.21.4, for instance, the shadow switch is simply off, because shadow_color does not exist there yet.

Questions

Do I need a resource pack to use the editor?

No. You draw in the browser and the editor builds the pack for you. If you already have one, you can import it and keep its codepoints.

Does this work without a server plugin?

Yes. The output is a resource pack plus a text component; anything that can set a title, a chest name or an action bar can use it. A Paper plugin is only needed for the live preview on a running server.

Is it free?

The editor runs in the browser and designing costs nothing. An account is only needed for saving projects on the server, image storage and the live bridge.