Proper font handling API for blocks and entities

[gpcf]

I'd like to have some proper way for text rendering onto blocks and entities, like the signs_lib does right now but less "hacky". Ideally, it should support internationalization (showing different texts to users speaking different languages) and a variety of non ASCII-Characters, like umlauts. Doing this the way signs_lib does it would require thousands of textures which would be very heavy on server and bandwidth load.

[sofar]

I'd like to have some proper way for text rendering onto blocks and entities, like the signs_lib does right now but less "hacky". Ideally, it should support internationalization (showing different texts to users speaking different languages) and a variety of non ASCII-Characters, like umlauts. Doing this the way signs_lib does it would require thousands of textures which would be very heavy on server and bandwidth load.

Several requests for this have been posted before, in github etc.

Signs_lib is a hack that can only make textures on entities, there is no way to render text on a block or a particle, other than compose a texture entirely before hand.

The short term solution is to hope that meta set nodedef will get merged with support for `tiles`. This would allow text to be placed on nodes through a mod.

Having the core render fonts would be problematic as font rendering is very locally dependent on i18n and locale, and some players may end up not seeing the text on nodes, and some would. This is a nightmare scenario that makes me want to suggest that it is best avoided entirely. Having non-ASCII characters is cool, but really complex. It would also mean that the server would have to disperse font assets to each client, for instance. Not a can you want to open if you ask me.