Qt sprite atlas packer built on an aggressive MaxRects bin-packing heuristic, with a GUI and a command-line mode (crop, merge duplicates, rotate, extrude, square atlases). It writes a PNG atlas plus a plain-text .atlas index. The author calls it a research implementation that was never released, so there are no binaries: you build it from source with Qt.
At a glance
Licence
LGPL-3.0
Commercial use
commercial OK
Credit
Not required
Status
needs-review: Useful, but a real question is open. Verify before you ship.
Verified
2026-10-04 (10d ago)
Maintenance
inactive: The source has had no new commits for over three years.
Maintenance: no push to the GitHub repository scriptum/Cheetah-Texture-Packer since 2016-11-05, per the GitHub API on 2026-09-30.
Licence version open: the repository LICENSE is the LGPL version 3 text, recorded as the bare vocabulary value LGPL-3.0. No source file header, .pro file or README line says "only" or "or later" (re-checked 2026-10-04 across the .cpp, .h and .pro files in src/), so LGPL-3.0-only vs LGPL-3.0-or-later cannot be chosen and license_spdx is left out. That is the one open question keeping this entry at needs-review; commercial stance and credit are not in doubt
The LGPL covers the packer. Atlases and .atlas files you generate from your own sprites are your output, and the LGPL does not claim them. Redistributing a modified packer is the LGPL event, not shipping a game with its atlases
The .atlas index uses the same layout as the author's UBFG bitmap-font generator. You write the loader yourself
Source only. Expect to fix Qt 5/6 build details
Evidence
Live GitHub LICENSE (2026-09-30): "GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 29 June 2007"
Live GitHub README (2026-09-30): "This tool was created as research implementation and never been released."
GitHub API (2026-09-30): license.spdx_id "LGPL-3.0", pushed_at 2016-11-05, not archived
Shallow clone of the default branch (2026-10-04): LICENSE still opens "GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 29 June 2007"; a grep of every .cpp, .h and .pro file in src/ and the README for "licen", "GPL" and "later version" found no licence header or version statement