This binary crate provides a CLI utility for batch converting a directory of fonts into signed distance fields, encoded in a protocol buffer for renderers such as Mapbox GL. This isn't really anything novel; it's just a frontend to pbffonttools that behaves similar to node-fontnik, but is faster and (in our opinion) a bit easier to use since it doesn't depend on node and all its headaches, or C++ libraries that need to be built from scratch (this depends on FreeType, but that's widely available on nearly any *nix-based system).
Check out sdfglyphrenderer for more technical details on how this works.
NOTE: This has requires you to have FreeType installed on your system. We recommend using FreeType 2.10 or newer. Everything will still work against many older 2.x versions, but the glyph generation improves over time so things will generally look better with newer versions.
This tool will create out_dir if necessary, and will put each range (of 256 glyphs, for
compatibility with Mapbox fontstack convention) in a new subdirectory bearing the font name.
Any existing glyphs will be overwritten in place.
You can install the released version from crates.io, or grab the latest git version by
running cargo install --git https://github.com/stadiamaps/build_pbf_glyphs build_pbf_glyphs.
$ build_pbf_glyphs /path/to/font_dir /path/to/out_dir