Commandline tool to generate images from charsets and texts.
While pixeling a font (also known as charset) for a demoscene production, it would be nice to know how it will look, using the final text.
It's very common, that some letters looking good in the font itself, but not when used in a real text, consisting of different words and phrases.
To check, if the letters of the font work nicely together, you can cut'n'paste them one by one to form a complete textpage, which can take hours. Or you can use a tool to do the same job in a few seconds: Chartist
Chartist reads your graphicsfile with the letters (the font/charset), your textfile with all those words/phrases and will output a new graphics file, showing your text by using your pixeled letters, simple as that.
Pixeled fonts are often used in demos for Retrocomputers like Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, etc.
From Wikipedia:
The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.
Those fonts are often starting with the SPACE-Symbol (Pos. 32) and ending with the Z-Letter (Pos. 90) of the ASCII-Table. If your font is not ordered this ascii-relative way, you can simply create a mapping table with the correct order. Chartist supports fonts with chars from Pos. 32 (Space) up to Pos. 126 (Tilde-Symbol), so that all upper- and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols can be used.
Most of those fonts have a fixed size, e.g. 8 by 8 pixels, 16 by 16 pixels and so on. But some symbols like the . (dot) or the , (comma) look a bit lost when placed in such a grid. To avoid this, you can create a width table to define letters or symbols with a smaller width.
The background color is simply auto-detected by looking which color is used by the majority of the pixels in the font-image. But you can set it manually, if the wrong color is choosen.
The amount of colors for the font is not limited. You can have indexed colors aswell as true color,
if the are supported by the image format, for example PNG.
The size of the letters is auto-detected by the height (y-axis) of the font-image. If it does not work, you can also set this value manually, expecially when the letters are arranged in multiple lines instead of one, single line.
- Python (3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9) - https://www.python.org/
- Pillow (Python Imaging Library) - https://pypi.org/project/Pillow/
If missing, Pillow can be installed using pip.
Linux:
$ pip install pillow
Windows:
$ python -m pip install pillow
Chartist is easy to use and really straightforward to generate a fontpage.
Just run chartist using the provided font and the test text:
$ chartist.py font-oneliner-asciirelative.png testtext.txt
The generated image should be displayed by the default imageviewer of the operating system.
Write the generated image to disk:
$ chartist.py font-oneliner-asciirelative.png testtext.txt -o fontpage.gif
The submited filetype ".gif" sets the format of the output file.
Force resolution of generated image:
$ chartist.py font-oneliner-asciirelative.png testtext.txt -r 320 256
Otherwise the resolution is calculated by the size of the chars and the amount of text.
Render a non ascii-relative font by using a mapping table:
$ chartist.py font-oneliner-nonasciirelative.png testtext.txt -m font-mappingtable.txt
Because the order of the font is assumed as ascii-relative by default.
You can also use fonts which are spread over multiple lines:
$ chartist.py font-multiline-asciirelative.png testtext.txt -s 16 16
In this case, you have to submit the size of the chars, because autodetection will not work.
Render a proportional font (some letters have different widths) by using a width table:
$ chartist.py font-oneliner-asciirelative-flexwidth.png testtext.txt -w font-widthtable.txt
By default the widths of the chars/letters are of a fixed size.
$ chartist.py --help
Usage: chartist charsetfile textfile [OPTION...]
Generate images from charsets and texts
mandatory arguments:
charsetfile imagefile with chars (e.g.: .png, .jpg, etc.)
textfile textfile with textline(s) (plain ascii e.g.: .txt)
optional arguments:
-s, --size size of the chars (x or x and y)
-w, --widthtable textfile with widthtable if chars are not of the same width
-m, --mappingtable textfile with mappingtable if charset is not ascii-relative
-o, --output outputfile with rendered text (e.g.: .png, .jpg, etc.)
-f, --force force overwrite of outputfile when it already exist
-r, --resolution resolution of imagefile with rendered text (x or x and y)
-c, --color backgroundcolor of imagefile with rendered text (R G B)
-v, --version show version info
-h, --help show this help
The optional arguments are only needed if autodetection of size, resolution or
color doesnt meet the required needs. The rendered image will only be saved, if
an outputfile (-o/--output) is set. Otherwise the image will be shown by the os.
The widthtable is just a textfile containing the letters, symbols, etc. and their
individual widths one per line and seperated by a tab.
The mappingtable is just a textfile containing all letters, symbols, etc. in the
same order as they are positioned in the imagefile.
examples:
chartist charsetfile.png textfile.txt
chartist chars.gif text.txt -o screen.png
chartist font.tif scroll.txt -s 8 -r 320 256
chartist letters.tif credits.txt -s 16 32 -r 256
chartist fontset.gif phrases.txt -o words.bmp -f
chartist graphic.jpg greets.txt -c 255 127 64 -o out.jpg
chartist charset.png textfile.txt -s 16 38 -l mappingtable.txt
chartist font.png textfile.txt -s 16 16 -w widthtable.txt
- chartist.py (the commandlinetool itself)
- font-oneliner-asciirelative.png (a simple pixeled font/charset in ascii-relative order)
- font-oneliner-nonrelative.png (the same font/charset in a non ascii-relative order, see mappingtable)
- font-oneliner-asciirelative-flexwidth.png (the same font/charset with flexible/proportional widths, see widthtable)
- font-multiline-asciirelative.png (the same font/charset spread over multiple lines)
- font-mappingtable.txt (example of a mappingtable for the non ascii-relative font/charset)
- font-widthtable.txt (example of a widthtable for the flexwidth font/charset)
- Output of files for the TIC-80 - Done, I have written TicMcTile for this job
- Output of the notorious Atari ST Scrollerformat (I only heard rumors about this one)
If you have any suggestions, bug reports or annoyances please report them to the issue tracker at https://github.com/PhilSwiss/chartist/issues
Development of chartist happens at GitHub: https://github.com/PhilSwiss/chartist