Lib.rs

extol_image_font allows rendering fonts that are stored as a single image (typically PNG), with each letter at a given location. This is common in game development, especially for pixel art fonts, since it allows the use of colors and creating a font can be done using any image editor as opposed to specialized software. These are also sometimes known as 'pixel fonts', but I choose the name 'image font' to be more precise (since bitmap fonts stored in OTB could also be called 'pixel fonts').

Features

Supported

• Unicode (anything that fits in a single codepoint)
• Specifying the coordinates with a string containing the letters in proper order (see the example asset)
• Manually specifying the rects (including non-uniform sizes)

Future work

• Padding and offsets for automatic texture layout
• Newlines embedding in strings

Out of scope

• Rendering from 'actual' bitmap fonts
• Automatic line wrapping

Caveats

• You need to have a portion of the texture that's just blank and 'map' the space character to it.
• Newlines are not currently supported.

How to use

Note that for pixel-accurate rendering, locating the text at integer coordinates 'in the world' can cause it to be blurry. I'm not sure why. If this happens, you'll want to offset the x/y coordinates by a small amount like 0.1. This seems to be less of an issue using this crate with bevy_ui.

Just take any entity with a Handle<Image> or UiImage component, such as something created with a SpriteBundle or ImageBundle, and add a ImageFontText component to it.

See the bevy_ui example for sample usage using the bevy_asset_loader crate to construct handles to the texture layout and image, or the sprite example if you want to use pixel fonts 'in the world' (such as for flying damage text).

If you're not using bevy_ui, you can disable the bevy_ui feature (enabled by default) to avoid taking a dependency on that.

This crate uses the image crate to load images, but only enables PNG support by default. If you need some other format, add your own dependency on (the same version of) image and enable the relevant features.

How it works

Credits

The sample font is by gnsh.