PIXEL Renderer

This repository contains a text renderer for PIXEL models.

Usage

Install dependencies (conda-forge provides pre-built Cairo, Pango and PyGObject):

conda create -n pixel python=3.12 -y
conda activate pixel
conda install -c conda-forge pycairo pygobject pango -y
pip install ".[dev,pangocairo]"

Tip

Without conda, pycairo and PyGObject are compiled from source and need system libraries. On Ubuntu 24.04+ / Debian 13+: sudo apt install gcc pkg-config libcairo2-dev libgirepository-2.0-dev gir1.2-pango-1.0 python3-dev. On older systems (GLib < 2.80, e.g. Ubuntu 22.04), install libgirepository1.0-dev and pip install "PyGObject<3.52". See these instructions.

Install:

pip install "pixel-renderer[pangocairo]"

Render text as an image (array):

from pixel_renderer.renderer import render_text

render_text(text="test", block_size=16, font_size=12)

For better consistency across platforms and easier reproducibility, we need to specify the exact fonts.

from font_download import FontConfig
from font_download.example_fonts.noto_sans import FONTS_NOTO_SANS
from pixel_renderer import PixelRendererProcessor

font_config = FontConfig(sources=FONTS_NOTO_SANS)
pixel_processor = PixelRendererProcessor(font=font_config)

pixel_processor.render_text_image("hello!").save("demos_output/hello.png")

pixel_processor.save_pretrained("demos_output/processor")

Cite

If you use this code in your research, please consider citing the work:

@misc{pixel2025renderer,
  title={PIXEL Renderer},
  author={Moryossef, Amit and Kesen, Ilker},
  howpublished={\url{https://github.com/sign/pixel-renderer}},
  year={2025}
}