Welcome!

Font Chef is a cross-platform C99 and C++ library to create character atlas of pre-rasterized glyphs from a font at a specified size and color. It is mostly useful in situations where you cannot afford to rasterize a piece of text again whenever it changes.

It abstracts stb_truetype to render glyphs to a pixmap and to produce appropriate clipping rects to later display those glyphs.

Hello world in C++

fc::font font = fc::from(font_data, fc::px(30), fc_color_black).add(fc_basic_latin).cook();
// use font.pixels() to make a texture
fc::render_result result = font.render("Hello, world!");
for (auto & map : result) {
    render(texture, map.source, map.target);
}

Hello world in C

fc_font * font = fc_construct(font_data, fc_px(30), fc_color_black);
fc_add(fc_basic_latin.start, fc_basic_latin.end);
fc_cook(font);
// use fc_get_pixels(font) to make a texture
 
const char hello[] = "Hello, world!";
fc_character_mapping output[32];
int count = fc_render(font, text, strlen(hello), output);
for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
    render(texture, output[i].source, output[i].target
}

Features

• Small, clean and easy-to-use API
• Ships with C++ wrapper classes
• Considers kerning when resolving rendering rects
• Ships with many standard unicode blocks to choose from
• Rendering API agnostic (it does not render anything directly, it returns pixels and clipping rects)
• Fully documented with examples for each function
• No external dependencies

Starting points

• The Manual page describes the core functionality of Font Chef
• The modules section has functions and structs grouped by type
• Check the Unicode Character Database for a list of unicode blocks