ingenten

A dead-simple pixel font library in Go, written for compatibility with Ebitengine.

Features:

• Simple pixel font format for ASCII characters, relying only on image data.
• Pluggable layout function for your own animations / effects.
• Line-wrapping for left-justified text.

Usage

1. Draw your pixel font, following the infographic below carefully. This infographic is also a test image used by this library.

2. Import in your project:

go get github.com/Frabjous-Studios/ingenten

3. Parse the font... (you probably want to embed it, right?)

type Game struct {
	font *ingenten.PixelFont
}

g.font, err := ingenten.LoadPixelFont("pixel_font.png", os.DirFS("."))
if err != nil {
	log.Fatal("no font for you today! :(", err)
}

4. Profit!

func (g *Game) Draw(screen *screen) {
	pos := image.Pt(30, 30)
	text := "Hello world!"
	measured := g.font.Measure(text)
	log.Println("drawing text to rect:", measured.Add(pos))
	
	g.font.PrintTo(screen, pos, text)
}

Developing / Testing Fonts

To test, cd internal and execute go run main.go. The demo scene requires you to type a few things in order to test the font. You can instead modify initial_text.txt in with as much or as little text as you'd like, to cut down on typing.

Planned features:

• Word-wrapping text so that it fits in a given image.Rectangle.
• Centered text.
• Right-justified text.
• Better kerning logic (take the maximum of left and right glyph instead of adding).

Pull requests are welcome.

Why "Ingenten"?

Because I convinced myself that it's Japanese for 'green bean tempura' and also 'ingredient' and I thought that might be a clever pun. Is it? I don't really know Japanese.

Anyway, Ebitengine was originally called 'Ebiten' which is the romanification of 'shrimp tempura'. 'Ingen' is Japanese for 'haricots' or 'green beans' and '-ten' is a suffix sometimes added to tempura dishes. 'Ingenten' is also 'ingredient', which I think describes the intent for this library pretty well... it provides a small, but important part of the recipe for drawing Pixel Fonts.