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();
fc::render_result result = font.render("Hello, world!");
// use font.pixels() to make a texture
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

Download a pre-built release package suitable for your platform and uncompress it somewhere you'll remember later (usually where you put other development libraries). Let's assume you uncompressed font-chef to /home/me/libs/font-chef.

Using CMake: If you're using CMake, specify the variable CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to point to it before running CMake in your project:

cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/home/me/libs

Afterwards you can use find_package(font-chef) and target_link_libraries(<your-executable> PUBLIC font-chef) to link <your-executable> against font-chef.

Not using CMake: Assuming you uncompressed font-chef to the same path as above, you should configure your build system to look for include files inside /home/me/libs/font-chef/include and to look for shared objects to link against inside /home/me/libs/font-chef/lib. In case of Windows, you should also point your linker to font-chef/bin as well.

Uncompress font-chef in a folder inside your project (e.g, your-project/third-party/font-chef) and then use add_subdirectory(third-party/font-chef EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL) to add the library target. Afterwards you can use find_package(font-chef) and target_link_libraries(<your-executable> PUBLIC font-chef) to link <your-executable> against font-chef.

Compiling the .c files directly in your project is not recommended nor supported.

You'll need CMake installed and in your path and also capable of finding you compiler and linker. Then, after checking out this repository:

mkdir build/
cd build/
cmake ..
make

Examples for C and C++ are in the src/examples folder. To build them, when running cmake as in Compile from source, add the following variable:

cmake .. -DFONT_CHEF_BUILD_EXAMPLES=1

You will need SDL2 available and CMake needs to be able to find it.

See here