Badger is a simple text to image converter, designed to render ASCII art using bitmap fonts.
It uses Pillow, the friendly PIL fork, to draw PNG images using a bitmap font in the .pil format. See below how to convert other font formats to .pil.
You know the drill:
sudo python setup.py install
# badger --help
Usage: badger [OPTIONS] FILENAME
Options:
-f FONT, --font=FONT Font name to use. Use -l for a list. (default: 4x6)
-e LEADING, --leading=LEADING
Extra spacing between lines. (default: 0)
-r TRACKING, --tracking=TRACKING
Extra spacing between characters. (default: 0)
-t TEXTCOLOR, --textcolor=TEXTCOLOR
Text color.
-b BGCOLOR, --bgcolor=BGCOLOR
Background color.
-w WIDTH, --width=WIDTH
Width in characters when converting images.
-l, --list-fonts Show available fonts and exit.
--help Show this message and exit.
Here's an example:
badger gnu.txt --font 5x8 --leading=-1 --tracking=-1 --textcolor="#dddddd" --bgcolor="#222222"
...which is the same as typing:
badger gnu.txt -f 5x8 -e -1 -r -1 -t #ddd -b #222
Note that you can use negative leading or tracking values, and specify colors by name instead of hex values (e.g. white or cyan).
Badger also works with images instead of text files, taking care of the conversion for you thanks to jp2a and Imagemagick.
badger gavroche.png -f 10x20 --width 40
badger assumes that your pil fonts will be available at ~/.badger/pil-fonts/.
Bitmap font formats like BDF or PCF can be converted to the PIL font format using the pilfont.py
script that comes with Pillow; it should be ready to use in your shell by typing pilfont or pilfont.py.
There's some good libre bitmap fonts around, we could certainly do with a bigger list:
Some Internet history archives took care of preserving this once-vibrant form of expression.
Badger is copylefted free software, released under the GNU General Public License v3 or any later version.