# node-fontnik-0.5.2

**Repository Path**: litcas/node-fontnik-0.5.2

## Basic Information

- **Project Name**: node-fontnik-0.5.2
- **Description**: No description available
- **Primary Language**: Unknown
- **License**: BSD-3-Clause
- **Default Branch**: master
- **Homepage**: None
- **GVP Project**: No

## Statistics

- **Stars**: 0
- **Forks**: 0
- **Created**: 2025-08-25
- **Last Updated**: 2025-09-02

## Categories & Tags

**Categories**: Uncategorized

**Tags**: None

## README

# node-fontnik

[![NPM](https://nodei.co/npm/fontnik.png?compact=true)](https://nodei.co/npm/fontnik/)
[![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/mapbox/node-fontnik.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/mapbox/node-fontnik)
[![codecov](https://codecov.io/gh/mapbox/node-fontnik/branch/master/graph/badge.svg)](https://codecov.io/gh/mapbox/node-fontnik)

A library that delivers a range of glyphs rendered as SDFs (signed distance fields) in a protocol buffer. We use these encoded glyphs as the basic blocks of font rendering in [Mapbox GL](https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js). SDF encoding is superior to traditional fonts for our usecase terms of scaling, rotation, and quickly deriving halos - WebGL doesn't have built-in font rendering, so the decision is between vectorization, which tends to be slow, and SDF generation.

The approach this library takes is to parse and rasterize the font with Freetype (hence the C++ requirement), and then generate a distance field from that rasterized image.

## [API](API.md)

## Installing

By default, installs binaries. On these platforms no external dependencies are needed.

- 64 bit OS X or 64 bit Linux
- Node.js v0.10.x, v0.12.x, v4.x or v6.x

Just run:

```
npm install
```

However, other platforms will fall back to a source compile: see [building from source](#building-from-source) for details.

## Building from source

```
npm install --build-from-source
```
Building from source should automatically install `boost`, `freetype` and `protobuf` locally using [mason](https://github.com/mapbox/mason). These dependencies can be installed manually by running `./scripts/install_mason.sh`.

## Background reading
- [Drawing Text with Signed Distance Fields in Mapbox GL](https://www.mapbox.com/blog/text-signed-distance-fields/)
- [State of Text Rendering](http://behdad.org/text/)
- [Pango vs HarfBuzz](http://mces.blogspot.com/2009/11/pango-vs-harfbuzz.html)
- [An Introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode](http://rishida.net/docs/unicode-tutorial/)