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A minimalist and lightweight debug text (bitmap font) drawing library based on SDL2, supporting UTF-8 character sets (including CJK)

• No need to pre-load any font files at runtime
• Header-Only design. Just include DebugText.hpp and you're ready to compile, no extra configuration needed
• Cross-platform

├── src/
│ └── generator.cpp # Glyph file generator main program
├── test/
│ └── loadtest.cpp # Bitmap font rendering test program
├── include/ # Public headers
│ ├── SDLWindowStuff.hpp # SDL window wrapper (Windows DWM support)
│ ├── AdvancedSDLWindow.hpp # Advanced SDL window Win32 API wrapper
│ ├── DebugText.hpp # Bitmap font rendering engine
│ ├── decode.hpp # UTF-8 decoder
│ ├── fusionpixel_12px_mono.hpp # Embedded 12px bitmap font data
│ ├── GL_Commdlg.hpp # Windows common dialog wrapper
│ ├── GL_DWMoperations.hpp # DWM rounded window preference settings
│ ├── SDL_EventPlus.hpp # SDL event polling wrapper
│ ├── SmoothCpp.hpp # Numeric smoothing / EMA filter
│ ├── StopWatch.hpp # High-precision timer
│ ├── Times.hpp # Frame rate control (Timer)
│ ├── TimeCounter.h # Simple time counter
│ └── UTF8toWide.hpp # UTF-8 to wide string conversion
├── font/
│ └── fusion-pixel-12px-monospaced-zh_hans.ttf # Fusion Pixel CJK font
├── tools/
│ └── toarray.py # Arbitrary file → C++ byte array (.hpp) converter
├── SDL2-2.24.0/ # SDL2 development libraries (include / lib)
├── SDL2_ttf-2.20.1/ # SDL2_ttf development libraries (include / lib)
├── Makefile # Build script
└── .vscode/
 ├── launch.json # VS Code debug configuration
 └── tasks.json # VS Code build tasks

The extra hpp libraries are for the font generator and demo program. For actual usage, you only need fusionpixel_12px_mono.hpp and DebugText.hpp.

• Compiler: Any g++ will do
• C++ Standard: C++17 or later
• Graphics Library: SDL2
• Link Libraries: SDL2main, SDL2
• Platform: Any platform supported by SDL2

• Compiler: MinGW-w64 (g++)
• C++ Standard: C++20
• Graphics Library: SDL2, SDL2_ttf
• Link Libraries: SDL2main, SDL2, SDL2_ttf, dwmapi, imm32, comctl32, comdlg32, ole32, uuid
• Platform: Windows only

SDL2 and SDL2_ttf development libraries are included in the repository (SDL2-2.24.0/, SDL2_ttf-2.20.1/), no additional download required.

# Build all targets
make
# Build only the generator
make generator
# Build only the loadtest
make loadtest
# Clean build artifacts
make clean

Build output goes to the build/ directory.

• Press Ctrl+Shift+B to select a build task
• Press F5 to automatically compile and start debugging

Reads font/fusion-pixel-12px-monospaced-zh_hans.ttf, iterates over all codepoints in the Unicode BMP range (U+0000 ~ U+FFFF), renders them as 1-bit bitmaps, and packs the output into font.bin.

Output format (font.bin):

Bitmap compression: 1 bit per pixel, row-major order, white background is 0, non-white is 1.

Uses the embedded 12px bitmap font data (fusionpixel_12px_mono.hpp) to render text, demonstrating the rendering capabilities of the DebugText.hpp engine.

Converts any binary file into a C++ const uint8_t array definition for embedding resource files into code.

python tools/toarray.py

• This project is licensed under the MIT License
• The font fusion-pixel-12px-monospaced-zh_hans.ttf is from Fusion Pixel, licensed under OFL (see font/LICENSE-OFL).

Originally, I wanted to render text on an STM32 LCD screen, but the default library only supports English, so I decided to make a font bitmap myself.
After finishing it, I realized this approach could also be useful in everyday development — not having to load font files in advance is really convenient!
And thus this library was born.

Theoretically possible, but I'm not a fan of ImGui, so if anyone is interested, feel free to write an adapter.