piece-c

Fast, feature-rich Artscene render engine

Example

$ piece -o docs/font/cp437_8x16.png docs/font/test.ans

And the resulting image:

We can also request piece to use an Amiga font:

$ piece -f amiga -o docs/font/topaz_a1200.png docs/font/test.ans

Resulting in:

Features

Supported file formats

• ANSi (.ans), mostly ECMA-048 compliant
• ASCII (.asc, .diz)
• Artworx (.adf)
• BIN (.bin)
• iCE Draw (.idf)
• PCBoard (.pcb)
• RIPScript (.rip, TODO)
• TundraDraw (.tnd)
• XBIN (.xb), fully Acid XBIN compliant

Supported pixel fonts

MS-DOS ("OEM") fonts

Font	Description	Sizes
cp437	MS-DOS Latin US	8x8 thin_8x8 8x14 8x16 thin_8x16
cp737	MS-DOS Greek	8x16
cp775	MS-DOS Baltic Rim	8x16
cp850	MS-DOS Latin 1	8x8 8x14 8x16 thin_8x8 thin_8x16
cp852	MS-DOS Latin 2	8x16
cp855	MS-DOS Cyrillic	8x16
cp857	MS-DOS Turkish	8x16
cp860	MS-DOS Portuguese	8x16
cp861	MS-DOS Icelandic	8x16
cp862	MS-DOS Hebrew	8x16
cp863	MS-DOS French Canada	8x16
cp865	MS-DOS Nordic	8x8 8x14 8x16 thin_8x8 thin_8x16
cp866	MS-DOS Cyrillic CIS 1	8x8 8x14 8x16
cp866b	MS-DOS Bulgarian	8x16
cp866c	MS-DOS Russian	8x16
cp866u	MS-DOS Ukrainian	8x8 8x14 8x16
cp869	MS-DOS Greek 2	8x16
cp1251	MS-DOS Slavic	8x8 8x14 8x16

Amiga fonts

Font	Description	Sizes
b_strict	Amiga B-Strict	8x8
b_struct	Amiga B-Strict	8x8
microknight	Amiga MicroKnight	8x16
microknight_plus	Amiga MicroKnight enhanced version	8x16
mo_soul	Amiga mO'sOul	8x16
p0t_noodle	Amiga P0T-NOoDLE	8x16
topaz_a500	Amiga Topaz 1 (A500, A1000, A2000)	8x16
topazplus_a500	Amiga Topaz 1 enhanced version	8x16
topaz_a1200	Amiga Topaz 2 (A600, A1200, A4000)	8x16
topazplus_a1200	Amiga Topaz 2 enhanced version	8x16

Atari fonts

Font	Description	Sizes
atascii_arabic	Atari ATASCII Arabic	8x16
atascii_graphics	Atari ATASCII Graphics	8x16
atascii_international	Atari ATASCII International	8x16

Commodore 64 fonts

Font	Description	Sizes
petscii	Commodore 64 PETSCII (unshifted)	8x16
petscii_shifted	Commodore 64 PETSCII (shifted)	8x16

Miscellanious fonts

Font	Description	Sizes
armscii8	Armenian ASCII (ARMSCII)	8x8 8x14 8x16
haik8	haik8 code page (ARMSCII)	8x8 8x14 8x16
iso	West European	8x8 8x14 8x16 thin_8x16
iso02	Central European	8x8 8x14 8x16
iso04	Baltic	8x8 8x14 8x16
iso05	Cyrillic	8x8 8x14 8x16
iso07	Greek	8x8 8x14 8x16
iso08	Hebrew	8x8 8x14 8x16
iso09	Turkish	8x16
iso15	West European	8x8 8x14 8x16 thin_8x16
koi8_r	Russian	8x14 8x16 8x8
koi8_rb	Russian	8x16
koi8_rc	Russian	8x16
koi8_u	Ukrainian	8x8 8x14 8x16
swiss	?	8x8 8x14 8x16
swiss_1131	Belarusian	8x16
swiss_1251	Cyrillic	8x16

Supported output formats

• Text (plain text)
• Image (bmp, gif, jpeg, png)

Supported dynamic languages

These extensions are highly experimental and subject to change

• Perl version 5.6 and up, see the piece-perl project
• Python version 2.6 and 2.7, see the piece-python project

Requirements

You need the following to compile piece:

• libgd
• Scons
• Python

Building

First inspect the build options, by running:

$ scons --help

To compile everything from source:

$ scons

To clean the build root:

$ scons -c

Building the Python extension

To build the Python extension, make sure you have the Python development headers installed.

On a Debian/Ubuntu based system:

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev

On a Red Hat/RPM based system:

$ sudo yum install python-devel

To build the extension:

$ scons --with-python

Installing

To install everything into /usr/local:

$ sudo scons install

Uninstalling

To remove the piece installation:

$ sudo scons uninstall

Acknowledgements

Inspired by the Ansilove ANSi to PNG converter, the first version of piece was written in Python. Because we required more speed, the Python version was ported to pure C and lots of features and font sets were added.

The fonts found in the fnt folder, are part of the FreeBSD newcons project and BSD licensed.