# node-fontnik

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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 v0.8.x or v0.10.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

Make sure you have `boost`, `freetype`, and `protobuf` installed. With [Homebrew](http://brew.sh/), you can
type `brew install boost --c++11 freetype protobuf --c++11`. The Makefile uses `pkg-config` to find these
libraries and links dynamically to them, so make sure that `pkg-config` can find
them.

```
npm install --build-from-source
```

## 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/)