font-dump

This project makes it easy to download tons of fonts and dump them to image files.

There are tons of custom-made fonts in the wild. Gathering them could help with machine vision, captcha systems, etc.

Usage

I suggest you use a Docker container for this. Fetching font images with Docker is easy:

$ mkdir output_images
$ docker build -t fontdump .
$ docker run --rm -v "$PWD/output_images:/out" fontdump

This will create an output_images/ directory and save a bunch of rendered fonts inside it.

The docker build command will likely take a few minutes; the dependencies for ttf_render are somewhat heavy-weight. The docker run command also takes several minutes, but most of that time is spent downloading fonts. Rendering itself is fairly fast.

Output directory

This will produce a directory structure like the following:

font_name/
  - lowercase/
    - a.png
    - b.png
    ...
  - uppercase/
    - A.png
    - B.png
  - digits/
    - 0.png
    - 1.png
    ...
another_name/
  - lowercase_dup/
    - a.png
    - b.png
    ...
  - uppercase/
    - A.png
    - B.png
    ...

The lowercase_dup directory is used when the lowercase characters appear to be very similar to the uppercase characters. This deals with the fact that, for some reason, many custom fonts only truly have uppercase.

The digits directory is only present for fonts that support digits.