Render text with BMFont generated bitmap fonts.

Status: The core of this code is reasonably well tested, but it's at an early stage, it's basically just been thrown up online, and you use it at your own risk.

I wanted kerning, and I wanted support for a widespread bitmap font format. BMFont is used to generate bitmap fonts from Truetype fonts, and the format it uses seems reasonably well supported.

I have vague plans to extend the format slightly to allow pre-rendered glyphs - so characters could be multi-colored or embossed, for example.

Install it with:

python -m pip install bmtext

Currently the API matches ImageDraw.text as closely as possible (given the limited feature-set).

from PIL import Image
from bmtext.meta import parse_file
from bmtext.pil import BMText

im = Image.new('RGB', (320, 180), color=(160, 160, 255))
drawer = BMText(im)
font = parse_file("tests/fixtures/raleway-30/raleway-thin-32.fnt")
# FIXME: Overlapping glyphs remove part of previous char.
drawer.text((5, 5), "Antidisestablishmentarianism\nThorough\nSHOUTING!!!\nTomato?", font, fill='blue')
im.show()

• FNT Compatibility:
  • Handle binary font metadata formats.
  • Test with multiple pages
  • Multiple channel support
  • Outline support (2-pass rendering)
• Improve error handling:
  • Malformed fnt files
  • Missing characters from font (replace/error)
• Features:
  • Allow arrangement of pre-rendered characters (rather than single-color alpha characters).
  • Implement textsize
  • Implement alignment
  • Implement anchor
• More testing:
  • Test with older versions of pillow
• Port to Python 3.5+ (remove the walrus operator)

Run the following to install the project (and dev dependencies) into your active virtualenv:

pip install -e .[dev]