Fontdue

Fontdue is a simple, no_std, pure Rust, TrueType (.ttf/.ttc) & OpenType (.otf) font rasterizer and layout tool. It strives to make interacting with fonts as fast as possible.

A non-goal of this library is to be allocation free and have a fast, "zero cost" initial load. This library does make allocations and depends on the alloc crate. Fonts are fully parsed on creation and relevant information is stored in a more convenient to access format. Unlike other font libraries, the font structures have no lifetime dependencies since it allocates its own space.

Example

Rasterization

// Read the font data.
let font = include_bytes!("../resources/Roboto-Regular.ttf") as &[u8];
// Parse it into the font type.
let font = fontdue::Font::from_bytes(font, fontdue::FontSettings::default()).unwrap();
// Rasterize and get the layout metrics for the letter 'g' at 17px.
let (metrics, bitmap) = font.rasterize('g', 17.0);

Layout

// Read the font data.
let font = include_bytes!("../resources/Roboto-Regular.ttf") as &[u8];
// Parse it into the font type.
let roboto_regular = fontdue::Font::from_bytes(font, fontdue::FontSettings::default()).unwrap();
// Create a layout context. This stores transient state needed to layout text.
// Laying out text needs some heap allocations; reusing this context reduces the need to reallocate space.
let mut layout = Layout::new();
// The vector where the glyphs positional information will be written to. This vec is cleared before it's written to.
let mut output = Vec::new();
// Various settings for laying out the text, such as alignment and wrapping settings.
let settings = LayoutSettings {
    ..LayoutSettings::default()
};
// The list of fonts that will be used during layout.
let fonts = &[roboto_regular];
// The text that will be laid out, its size, and the index of the font in the font list to use for that section of text.
let styles = &[
    &TextStyle::new("Hello ", 35.0, 0),
    &TextStyle::new("world!", 40.0, 0),
];
// Calculate the layout.
layout.layout_horizontal(fonts, styles, &settings, &mut output);

Performance

Rasterization

This benchmark measures the time it takes to generate the glyph metrics and bitmap for the letter 'g' over a range of sizes. Lower is better. This is using the idiomatic APIs for rusttype (link), ab_glyph (link), and fontdue.

Older versions of rusttype use a naive rasterizer that's roughly 10x slower than fontdue. The newer rusttype shares the same rasterizer as ab_glyph and glyph_brush (link).

Layout

This benchmark measures the time it takes to layout latin characters of sample text with wrapping on word boundaries. This is using the idiomatic APIs for both glyph_brush_layout (link) and fontdue.

Important Notices

Maintenance

Please bear with me on new features or quirks that you find. I will definitely get to issues you open (also thank you for opening them), but I don't have as much time as I would like to work on fontdue so please be paitent, this is a mostly solo project <3.

Reusing Fontdue code

Please don't reuse fontdue's raster code directly in your project. fontdue uses unsafe code in the rasterizer, and the rasterizer itself is very not safe to use on its own with un-sanitized input.

TrueType & OpenType Table Support

Fontdue now depends on ttf-parser (link). There is a lot of work involved in parsing font tables, and I only had the resolve to write a parser for TypeType. The wonderful developer on ttf-parser has done a lot of great work and supports some OpenType tables, so I opted to use that library.

Attribution

Fontdue started as a slightly more production ready wrapper around font-rs (link) because of how fast it made rasterization look, and how simple the wonderful rusttype (link) crate made font parsing look. Since then, I've done a few rewrites on the raster and it no longer shares any code or methodology to font-rs, but I feel like it still deservers some attribution. Instead of attempting to find the converage of a pixel, fontdue performs pseudo ray tracing collision detection on the geometry of the glyph with the pixel grid and estimates the shading.