Skrift

Pure-Ruby TrueType / OpenType glyph rendering — a Ruby port of libschrift.

_{Rendered by examples/showcase.rb: the text and non-Latin scripts by skrift, the box-drawing of the W3C UTF-8 alignment test by skrift-boxdrawing, the colour emoji by skrift-color, all composited onto X11 by skrift-x11.}

Skrift rasterises TrueType/OpenType outlines to 8-bit anti-aliased coverage, in pure Ruby with no native extensions. If you need performance and don't mind a C dependency, use libschrift; if you want pure Ruby — and are happy to cache glyphs after rendering — this is for you.

"Skrift" is Norwegian for "text" / "writing" / "scripture", a close cognate of "Schrift" — chosen to set this apart from libschrift and leave that name free for a direct C wrapper.

Skrift is deliberately small and opinionated (the full version lives in skrift/README.md):

• Small code is a virtue — as long as it improves rather than hinders understanding. Every feature is weighed against its complexity cost.
• Big features belong in separate gems. The core stays a minimal rasteriser; optional capabilities are opt-in plugins that build on it.
• No platform code in the core. Rendering to 8-bit greyscale lets skrift integrate cleanly with the likes of XRender — through a thin adapter, not by pushing platform code into the library.
• Anti-aliased by default; idiomatic Ruby over micro-optimisation; low coupling without architecture acrobatics (no factories, no abstract-interface zoos).

This repository is that philosophy made concrete: a monorepo holding the core alongside the plugins and adapter it was designed to grow.

Each subdirectory is an independently publishable gem with its own gemspec, Gemfile and test suite:

Consumers such as ruby-term live in their own repositories.

These gems change in lockstep often — a single feature regularly touches the core, an adapter and a plugin at once. The monorepo gives atomic cross-gem commits and one test gate, while each gem keeps its own gemspec so it still publishes independently.

Each gem's Gemfile pulls its siblings from the monorepo with a git do … end block (so Bundler finds each gemspec in its subdir). To work against your local checkout instead of github, set one Bundler local override at the repo root — once, globally:

bundle config set --global disable_local_branch_check true
bundle config set --global local.skrift "$PWD"        # run from the repo root

That single override redirects the whole skrift.git source to this checkout, for every gem and for downstream consumers (ruby-term, …) alike.

Published dependencies are declared as version constraints in each *.gemspec — never path:/git: — so installing any gem from RubyGems resolves its siblings correctly.

Aggregate rake tasks at the repo root operate over every gem in dependency order:

rake test               # run every gem's suite
rake build              # build every gem into pkg/
rake publish            # build + push every gem to RubyGems
rake build:skrift       # …or operate on a single gem
rake publish:skrift-x11

ISC, the same permissive license as libschrift. See each gem's LICENSE.txt.