Simple Font Renderer

A lightweight bitmap font renderer designed for embedded and other resource-constrained applications. A converter is included to transform the BMFont outputs into C files. Note that Simple Font Renderer is not a library; it is intended as a starting point and should be modified to fit your use case.

Features

Supports variable-width fonts with a configurable bit depth of 1, 2, 4, or 8 bits per pixel.
Storage space is reduced by removing duplicated glyph data.
Fonts are stored as regular C files, ensuring compatibility with most compilers.
Efficient renderer requiring no additional libraries in most scenarios. The provided example implementation uses SDL2 for rendering.

Limitations

No support for multi-line text. Multi-line rendering can be implemented using text_measure and text_render if required.
To simplify rendering and minimize data size, kerning pairs are not supported.
By default, only printable ASCII characters are rendered.

Converting Fonts

Ensure a recent version of Node.js and NPM is installed. Install dependencies by entering the converter directory and running npm install. Font descriptors should be exported from BMFont in the text format, while textures should use the PNG format. To convert a font to a C file, run:

npm run convert <input> <bit depth> <destination>

The input should be a path to a font descriptor exported from BMFont. For optimal results, disable font smoothing within BMFont when using a bit depth of 1.

Rendering Text

The example renderer uses SDL2. Ensure it is installed before continuing. Once a font has been converted and placed in the renderer directory, build the renderer by running make from within the renderer directory.

License