User-Friendly API / etc

[mattdesl]

Ok, first off, this is bloody awesome. 👍

I'm poking around with the tool and finding the API doc is a bit dated and doesn't match what's currently on npm. Also I'm wondering if there are any details on the spec for how glyphs are stored, or whether you have plans to release smaller modules to help parse the data into something more user-friendly?

[mattdesl]

Alright, I think this is what I need. 😎

https://github.com/mapbox/node-fontnik/blob/master/proto/glyphs.proto

[kkaefer]

https://github.com/mapbox/fontnik also has a JS only implementation of this, but it's a lot less tested and unused.

[lbud]

@mattdesl thanks for flagging re API docs — I made a few last-minute changes to the API for the last release and failed to update those, but just pushed an update in b058c5d.

Not sure what your use case is/if this helps at all, but https://github.com/mapbox/fontmachine is the connection between this and the actual PBFs used in Mapbox GL.

[mattdesl]

Thanks.

My use case right now is mostly for gamedev and prototyping so the offline/freetype approach works well.

I checked out fontmachine; I may build some higher level modules on top of fontnik for extracting bitmaps, packing them into an atlas, etc. Cheers. 👍

[mikemorris]

@mattdesl Our current implementations of extracting glyphs, atlas packing, line breaking and rendering are in https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js, would be neat to break them out into individual modules if you're looking for somewhere to start!