Bitmap Font Tools

[mattdesl]

NodeJS tools built on Freetype2 and/or Opentype.js to replace gdx-fontpack. Vector SVG output would also be nice.

Also a tool that can take in vector paths or bitmasks and produce SDF images for scalable rendering.

[ayamflow]

I'd love to be able to include the font pipeline in our build process. Download, subset, convert (to css, 3d, bmp...)... It seems there is a lack of CLI/API for this kind of tasks.

[mattdesl]

@ayamflow yeah the automation for fonts is generally lacking compared to npm/js/etc.

some updates on this issue:

• node-fontnik can render a font to a SDF tile (for GPU rendering)
• sdf-bitmap-glyphs is a simple high-level wrapper on node-fontnik
• ndarray-bin-pack can be used to pack the tiles into an atlas

Still a few more things before it can fully replace gdx-fontpack (mapbox/node-fontnik#90) but getting there.

[ayamflow]

Also saw this one: ttf2woff2, convenient since ttf + woff 1/2 are enough for evergreen browsers. But it's more for the web side (not bitmap).