three-text-geometry

The port of the JavaScript versions of three-bmfont-text, layout-bmfont-text, load-bmfont, and word-wrapper to Pure Typescript, this library enables fast text rendering with Three.js and bitmap font.
The difference in rendering speed is noticeable when animations are enabled, and it runs 10x faster than canvas texture based text rendering.

Requirements

• Three.js 0.167.1 or later
• Node.js 20.8.1 or later

Installation

NPM

$ npm install three-text-geometry
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PNPM

$ pnpm add three-text-geometry
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Yarn

$ yarn add three-text-geometry
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Usage

For detailed information, read the documentation and check the demo.

How to run the demo

The demo is written in TypeScript using React, so you need to check out the repository and build sources to run the demo app. The source code for the demo is available here.

git clone https://github.com/gumob/three-text-geometry.git
cd three-text-geometry/demo
corepack enable
pnpm install
pnpm dev
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Please refer to the README.md in the demo directory for more details.

Sample code

1. Combine Axios and THREE.TextureLoader to load assets asynchronously.
2. Instantiate TextGeometry using the loaded BMFont and THREE.Texture data.

TextGeometry supports word wrapping, text aligning, letter spacing, kerning. see the list to see how each option works.

import * as THREE from 'three'
import axios from 'axios'
import TextGeometry, { BMFont, BMFontJsonParser, TextGeometryOption, TextAlign } from 'three-text-geometry'

class TextGeometryRenderer extends React.Component {

    renderer?: THREE.WebGLRenderer
    scene?: THREE.Scene
    camera?: THREE.PerspectiveCamera

    componentDidMount() {
        const fontUri: string =
            'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gumob/three-text-geometry/develop/tests/fonts/OdudoMono-Regular-64.json'
        const textureUri: string =
            'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gumob/three-text-geometry/develop/tests/fonts/OdudoMono-Regular-64.png'
        Promise.all([
            axios.get(fontUri).then(res => new BMFontJsonParser().parse(res.data)), /** Load a font */
            new THREE.TextureLoader().loadAsync(textureUri) /** Load a texture */
        ]).then((values: [BMFont, THREE.Texture]) => {
            let font: BMFont
            let texture: THREE.Texture
            values.forEach((value: BMFont | THREE.Texture) => {
                if (value instanceof THREE.Texture) texture = value as THREE.Texture
                else font = value as BMFont
            })
            this.initScene(font, texture)
        })
    }

    initScene(font: BMFont, texture: THREE.Texture) {
        /** Renderer */
        this.renderer = new THREE.WebGLRenderer({ alpha: true })
        this.renderer.setClearColor(0x000000, 0)
        this.renderer.setPixelRatio(window.devicePixelRatio)
        this.renderer.setSize(window.innerWidth, window.innerHeight)

        const container = document.querySelector('#demo')
        container?.append(this.renderer.domElement)

        /** Scene */
        this.scene = new THREE.Scene()
        this.scene.background = new THREE.Color(0x000000)

        /** Camera */
        const aspect = window.innerWidth / window.innerHeight
        this.camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(45, aspect, 1, 100000)
        this.camera.position.set(1000, 1000, 2000)
        this.camera.lookAt(0, 0, 0)

        /** Geometry */
        const text: string = 'Hollo World.\nHello Universe.' /** The text to layout. Newline characters `\n` will cause line breaks */
        const textOption: TextGeometryOption = {
            font: font,
            align: TextAlign.Left,
            width: 1600,
            flipY: textures.flipY,
            multipage: false
        }
        const textGeometry = new TextGeometry(text, textOption)

        /** Material */
        const textMaterial = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({
            map: texture,
            side: THREE.DoubleSide,
            transparent: true,
            color: 0x666666,
        })

        /** Mesh */
        const mesth = new THREE.Mesh(textGeometry, textMaterial)
            .rotateY(Math.PI)
            .rotateZ(Math.PI)
            .translateX(-box.x / 2)
            .translateY(-box.y / 2)
        this.scene!.add(mesth)

        this.updateScene()
    }

    updateScene() {
        this.renderer?.render(this.scene!, this.camera!)
        this.stats?.update()
        requestAnimationFrame(this.updateScene.bind(this))
    }

    render() {
        return <div id='demo'></div>
    }
}

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Screen coordinate system and Three.js coordinate system

TextGeometry places text based on the screen coordinate system. Therefore, when THREE.Mesh is added to the scene, the text will be placed inverted when viewed from the positive direction of the Z axis. To make the text visible from the positive z-axis, you need apply transformation.

BMFontParser interface supports JSON, XML, ACII, and Binary fromat

Parse font data in JSON format

import { BMFontJsonParser } from 'three-text-geometry'
const font: BMFont = new BMFontJsonParser().parse(/** `string` or `object` data JSON format */)
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Parse font data in XML format

import { BMFontXMLParser } from 'three-text-geometry'
const font: BMFont = new BMFontXMLParser().parse(/** `string` data in XML format */)
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Parse font data in ASCII format

import { BMFontAsciiParser } from 'three-text-geometry'
const font: BMFont = new BMFontAsciiParser().parse(/** `string` data in ASCII format */)
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Parse font data in Binary format

import { BMFontBinaryParser } from 'three-text-geometry'
const font: BMFont = new BMFontBinaryParser().parse(/** `string` data in ASCII Binary */)
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The value list of TextGeometryOption

key	type	description	default	required
font	BMFont	The BMFont definition which holds chars, kernings, etc	undefined	✔
width	number	The desired width of the text box, causes word-wrapping and clipping in WordWrapMode mode. Leave as undefined to remove word-wrapping (default behaviour)	undefined
mode	WordWrapMode	A mode for word-wrapper; can be WordWrapMode.Pre (maintain spacing), or WordWrapMode.NoWrap (collapse whitespace but only break on newline characters), otherwise assumes normal word-wrap behaviour (collapse whitespace, break at width or newlines)	undefined
align	TextAlign	This can be TextAlign.left, TextAlign.center or TextAlign.right	TextAlign.left
letterSpacing	number	The letter spacing in pixels	0
lineHeight	number	The line height in pixels	font.common.lineHeight
tabSize	number	The number of spaces to use in a single tab	4
start	number	The starting index into the text to layout	0
end	number	The ending index (exclusive) into the text to layout	text.length
flipY	boolean	Whether the texture will be Y-flipped	true
multipage	boolean	Whether to construct this geometry with an extra buffer containing page IDs. This is necessary for multi-texture fonts	false

Generate Bitmap Font

The following tools can be used to convert fonts to a bitmap font:

• msdf-bmfont-web (Online Tool)
• msdf-bmfont-xml (Commandline Tool)
• Hiero (Desktop App, Windows Only)

Read the Three.js documentation about a bitmap font.

Using msdf-bmfont-xml

Install msdf-bmfont-xml

$ npm install msdf-bmfont-xml -g
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Generate a bitmap font

$ msdf-bmfont \
    --output-type json \
    --filename 'OdudoMono-Regular-128' \
    --font-size 128 \
    --texture-size 1024,1024 \
    --field-type 'sdf' \
    'OdudoMono-Regular.otf'
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Copyright

Punycode is released under MIT license, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like.