quasilyte/bitfontier

A bitmap font maker for Go

bitfontier

Overview

bitfontier is a tool to generate bitmap fonts for Go programs.

To be more specific:

• it takes a set of images organized in a particular way for an input,
• generates a Go package that can be used to create font.Face objects

These font.Face objects can then be used to render text in your Go programs. One example would be using Ebitengine - the fonts generated by this program are suitable for videogames!

This tool takes a lot of inspiration from hajimehoshi/bitmapfont.

Features:

• Efficient bitmap generation
• Outputs a ready-to-use Go package
• Produced Go packages ("fonts") can be bundled as Go modules
• The generator has options to fine-tune the produced font behavior
• Uses separate images for glyphs as input (easy to edit)

You can basically create a bitmap font for your Go app by using just this tool and some sprite editor (GIMP, Aseprite, etc).

Installation

$ go install github.com/quasilyte/bitfontier/cmd/bitfontier@latest

Fonts

Ready-to-use fonts created by bitfontier:

• bitsweetfont

Usage

First, you need to create a set of images that would form a bitmap font. The font can have multiple base sizes and support multiple languages. We'll start with a single-size English set of images.

The general layout expected by this tool is:

$size/
  $tag/
    65.png
    66.png
    ...
  ...
...

The root of this folder structure is called data-dir.

• $size is a base font size (e.g. 1, 1.3)
• $tag is an arbitrary tag for the set of glyphs (e.g. en, common, symbols)

The image filename consist of an utf-8 code (in decimal form) and extension (it's advised to use PNGs).

All images inside the size folder should have identical bounds (e.g. 8x16). Images can use any non-transparent color for the letter mask: this library only checks for alpha channel to build a bitmap.

After you're ready, run the tool:

# Use --help to learn about the other flags!
./bitfontier --data-dir ./_data --pkgname myfont

This will produce a folder called myfont containing a Go package. Copy that package to your app's folder and use it as an ordinary package. Or push it as a Go module on GitHub and install it in a proper way.

Hint: if you want to bundle a font as a module, make sure to install the dependencies like golang.org/x/image/font to the font module.

After installing the generated font package, you can instantiate font.Face objects:

func example() {
    // ff is a font.Face, the "1" suffix comes from the
    // data dir, there will be more constructors if your
    // bitmap font defines them.
    ff := myfont.New1()

    // It's possible to create programmatically scaled versions
    // of your base font sizes. It won't be blurry.
    // Only whole scaling factors are available (2, 3, 4, ...)
    ff2 := myfont.Scale(ff, 2)
    ff3 := myfont.Scale(ff, 3)
}

Let's assume your font has both size=1 and size=1.3 base variants. We can squeeze a wide range of font sizes out of it using Scale:

• 1 (base size)
• 1.3 (base size)
• 2 (1*2)
• 2.6 (1.3*2)
• 3 (1*3)
• 3.9 (1.3*3)
• 4