digitallyserviced / tdfgo

TheDraw font renderer in Go

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Table of Contents

• About
  • Features
• Getting Started
  • Prerequisites
  • Installation
  • Font Directories
• Usage
  • Clock
  • Print
    • Examples
  • Watch
    • Examples
    • Options
  • Fonts
    • Examples
    • Options
• Support
• Project assistance
• Contributing
• Authors & contributors
• License
• Acknowledgements

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About

TheDraw font parser and console text renderer. This utility was inspired by the tdfiglet CLI utility. I wanted to also use the fonts in another utility I am working on.

tdfiglet was missing some features and the ability to use more than a single font per file. I realized there was multiple fonts with different color schemes in some of them as well as font packs containing files with lots of different fonts within one font file.

Features

• Render TheDraw fonts in the terminal
• Supports COLOR font types only as they are more plentiful and cooler looking
• Configure spacing between characters, the size a (space) character takes up in text
• Use a random font for content
• Supported characters and a missing character view available when listing fonts to find a font that contains the necessary characters.
• print - use arguments or stdin as the text content to render
• watch - specify a command to repeat and render the output (clocks, status, live banner)
• clock - alias to print date +%H:%m:%S to the console (tmux lock, console clock) ./tdfgo clock
• fonts - dump the list of fonts available with information about the font and coloring previews ./tdfgo fonts -v
• Preview fonts when dumping the list with customizable content ./tdfgo fonts -vp -t text
• Shell completion of all flags and commands, completion of font file names found, completion of fonts found within a single font file

Screenshots

Zsh / Bash / Fish Completion	Font Dump Verbose with Preview

Built With

Go 1.18 Neovim Arch Linux

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Go 1.18

Installation

[?] Clone the repo and get started

git clone https://github.com/digitallyserviced/tdfgo.git
cd tdfgo
go build
./tdfgo fonts -vp -t YOURTEXT

The utility searches Font Directories for available fonts. Launch the utility from the cloned directory or copy fonts into one of the defined directories to be able to use them from anywhere.

I plan to get an installer going soon.

Usage

Options

  -w, --columns int      Specify the amount of columns or width that the text will be rendered into (default 80)
  -f, --font string      Specify font to use for TEXT if multiple uses first (default "mindstax")
  -i, --fontIndex int    If multiple fonts per file specify the index of the font to use (default 0)
  -h, --help             help for tdfgo
  -j, --justify string   Specify the justification for rendered content, computes padding if necessary given current terminal width. {left, center, justify} (default "left")
  -m, --monochrome       Render text in monochrome by stripping color escape sequences. Will then be using the default foreground color
  -r, --random           Use a random font as the selected font when rendering text content
  -W, --spaceWidth int   Set the spacing for a space character in the text provided (default 3)
  -s, --spacing int      Override the fonts own specified spacing used between characters. (default -1)
  -v, --verbose          Print more information about fonts

Print

Using the global font options render the supplied text to the console. Passing arguments to print or by piping text to stdin is how you define the text content.

tdfgo [flags] print "TEXT ARGS..."

Print Examples

# pass argument to print command with specified font and font index
tdfgo -f carbonx -i 2 print `id -un`

# pass argument via stdin and a random font used with details about it
id -un | tdfgo -r -v print

Clock

Using the selected font and specified options output a clock to the terminal

# Center the clock using the yazoox font and use font #4 (0 based index)
tdfgo -j center -f yazoox -i 3 clock

Watch

Run a command every # interval and use the output as the text rendered using a font

tdfgo watch [-i interval] CMD args... [flags]

Watch Examples

# console clock
tdfgo watch -n 1s 'date "+%H:%m:%S"'
tdfgo clock

# print ONLINE or OFFLINE based off ping success
tdfgo watch 'ping -c1 -w 1 google.com>/dev/null 2>&1 && echo -n ONLINE || echo -n OFFLINE'

# print 1min load avg every 0.5 seconds
tdfgo watch 'cat /proc/loadavg | cut -d" " -f 1'

Watch Options

  -h, --help                help for watch
  -n, --interval duration   Interval between executions of the specified command (default 1s)

Fonts

List all available fonts found in the default directories

tdfgo fonts [-v] [-p] [-t text] [-X] [pattern] 

Fonts Examples

# list fonts with impact in name
tdfgo fonts impact

# list fonts with much more information
tdfgo fonts -v

# list fonts with a preview output using default string "Preview"
tdfgo fonts -p

# list fonts with information about required characters specified by -t
# useful to find fonts having all the characters you need
tdfgo fonts -p -X -t "!@#$JDKALFK@{}"

Fonts Options

  -X, --checkChars    Check fonts to see if they are missing any characters in the defined preview text
  -h, --help          help for fonts
  -p, --preview       Output a preview for the fonts
  -t, --text string   Sample string to use for previewing fonts (default "Preview")

The font directories searched:

• .
• ./fonts
• /usr/share/tdfgo/fonts
• /usr/local/share/tdfgo/fonts
• ~/.config/tdfgo/fonts
• Built-in (There are two fonts mindstax.tdf and yazoox.tdf embedded within the binary for use anywhere)

Support

Reach out to the maintainer at one of the following places:

• GitHub issues
• Contact options listed on this GitHub profile

Project assistance

If you want to say thank you or/and support active development of TDFGO:

• Add a GitHub Star to the project.
• Tweet about the TDFGO.
• Write interesting articles about the project on Dev.to, Medium or your personal blog.

Together, we can make TDFGO better!

Contributing

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! Contributions are what make the open-source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make will benefit everybody else and are greatly appreciated.

Authors & contributors

The original setup of this repository is by DigitallyServiced.

For a full list of all authors and contributors, see the contributors page.

License

This project is licensed under the Creative Commons.

See LICENSE for more information.

Acknowledgements

The CLI utility tdfiglet which introduced me to TheDraw fonts

The great CLI editor Neovim which allows me to ditch a mouse

The great wezterm terminal emulator which is beautiful and acts as my WM, status bar, modal dialogs, my everything...

RoySAC for TheDraw Font File Spec and fonts and other great info about ASCII/ANSI art. As well as his Font Utility which provided me some code insight into the font file definition.

WAB Ansi Logo Maker which also had inisght into the TheDraw font spec in javascript

textimg for making renderings of the fonts in images

asciinema for the console recorder to make the preview gifs

asciinema gif generator for the asciinema asciicast gif generator

EdenEast nightfox color schemes for terafox and carbonfox themes that all the images/gifs use as the wezterm console color schemes

tdfgo's Issues

Package for packages manager please?

Hi, I have come across and use this tool for a while and I really like it!

Could you package tdfgo to Homebrew or Nix pkgs please?

Although I'm a linux user, I quite like brew recently and I think tdfgo would benefit a lot for having a brew package because brew is cross os/distro (yes is work on linux, especially on Steam Desk).

leverage recutils

I noticed that tdfgo fonts ... output is very nearly a recutils format.

RoySac has over 1k fonts alone, and there may be others I'm unaware of, so making the (hopefully) small changes required to support recutils could improve ergonomics around querying, searching, and general composability of tdfgo with other cli utils.

Build error related to coloredcobra

go build                                                                                                  (08-17 08:58)
cmd/root.go:20:2: github.com/ivanpirog/[email protected]: replacement directory /home/chris/Documents/tdfgo/pkg/coloredcobra does not exist

I'm not familiar with go so not really sure how to troubleshoot this.

TODO

Just some ideas for enhancements or features or changes...

• Figure out goreleaser to build distro/dockerfile/etc shit
• Caching fonts or bundling in small generated db?
• Specify font path with flag/argument --fontDir
• Add BLOCK font types
• and OUTLINE
• Document/comment library and/or separate from cli util
• Add your suggestion here!