three-bmfont-text

(click for demo) - (source)

Bitmap font rendering for ThreeJS, batching glyphs into a single BufferGeometry. Supports word-wrapping, letter spacing, kerning, signed distance fields, multi-texture fonts, and more. About 8kb after minification.

Below is an example that uses load-bmfont to parse BMFont files on the fly with XHR:

var createGeometry = require('three-bmfont-text')
var loadFont = require('load-bmfont')

loadFont('fonts/Arial.fnt', function(err, font) {
  //create a geometry of packed bitmap glyphs, 
  //word wrapped to 300px and right-aligned
  var geometry = createGeometry({
    text: 'Lorem ipsum\nDolor sit amet.',
    width: 300,
    align: 'right',
    font: font
  })
  
  //the resulting layout has metrics and bounds
  console.log(geometry.layout.height)
  console.log(geometry.layout.descender)
    
  //the texture atlas containing our glyphs
  var texture = THREE.ImageUtils.loadTexture('fonts/Arial.png')

  //We can use plain old bitmap materials
  var material = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({
    map: texture,
    transparent: true,
    color: 0xaaffff
  })

  //now do something with our text mesh ! 
  var mesh = new THREE.Mesh(geometry, material)
})

The glyph layout is built on layout-bmfont-text.

Usage

geometry = createText(opt)

Returns a new BufferGeometry with the given options. The ThreeJS-specific options:

• flipY (boolean) whether the texture will be Y-flipped (default true)
• multipage (boolean) whether to construct this geometry with an extra buffer containing page IDs. This is necessary for multi-texture fonts (default false)

The rest of the options are passed to layout-bmfont-text:

• font (required) the BMFont definition which holds chars, kernings, etc
• text (string) the text to layout. Newline characters (\n) will cause line breaks
• width (number, optional) the desired width of the text box, causes word-wrapping and clipping in "pre" mode. Leave as undefined to remove word-wrapping (default behaviour)
• mode (string) a mode for word-wrapper; can be 'pre' (maintain spacing), or 'nowrap' (collapse whitespace but only break on newline characters), otherwise assumes normal word-wrap behaviour (collapse whitespace, break at width or newlines)
• align (string) can be "left", "center" or "right" (default: left)
• letterSpacing (number) the letter spacing in pixels (default: 0)
• lineHeight (number) the line height in pixels (default to font.common.lineHeight)
• tabSize (number) the number of spaces to use in a single tab (default 4)
• start (number) the starting index into the text to layout (default 0)
• end (number) the ending index (exclusive) into the text to layout (default text.length)

geometry.update(opt)

Re-builds the geometry using the given options. All options are the same as in the constructor, except for multipage which must be specified during construction-time.

This method will recompute the text layout and rebuild the WebGL buffers.

geometry.layout

This is an instance of layout-bmfont-text. This supports metrics for descender, baseline, xHeight, width, height, capHeight, etc.

Demos

To run/build the demos:

git clone https://github.com/Jam3/three-bmfont-text.git
cd three-bmfont-text
npm install

Then choose one of the demos to run:

npm run test-3d
npm run test-2d
npm run test-multi

Open up localhost:9966 (it may take a few seconds for the initial bundle). Then when you save the corresponding JS file (in test/) it should re-bundle and trigger a live-reload event on the browser.

To build the distribution demo:

npm run build

Help

Asset Handling

See docs/assets.md

Signed Distance Field Rendering

See docs/sdf.md

Multi-Texture Rendering

See docs/multi.md

See Also

See text-modules for more text and font related tools.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.md for details.