🔒 Locked

OpenGL and Foreign Language Display

Started by shalrath Apr 12, 2005 at 10:11 PM 5 replies 850+ views

Original Post

Apr 12, 2005 at 10:11 PM

There are a plethora of tutorials out there describing the vaious ways to display the roman alphabet in OpenGL, but what about foreign languages? Particularly East Asian languages, where there are simply too many characters to make a bitmap font? How can I, for instance, display a Japanese sentence on my OpenGL window? If anyone knows of any resources, or has any idea please help me out. I've been searching around the GameDev forums, around the internet in general, and I'm not having much luck.

ff8

Apr 12, 2005 at 10:35 PM

same techno use bitmap for it or freetype (there is a tutorial for it in NeHe) :)
bye

tolaris

Apr 12, 2005 at 10:57 PM

Quote:
Original post by shalrath
There are a plethora of tutorials out there describing the vaious ways to display the roman alphabet in OpenGL, but what about foreign languages? Particularly East Asian languages, where there are simply too many characters to make a bitmap font? How can I, for instance, display a Japanese sentence on my OpenGL window? If anyone knows of any resources, or has any idea please help me out. I've been searching around the GameDev forums, around the internet in general, and I'm not having much luck.

For Japanese you could probably restrict your engine to just hiragana/katakana support, which should bring the amount of characters to manageable amount.

For anything more advanced you might want to check http://opengl.geek.nz/weblog/archives/000012.html and then http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/henryj/code/#FTGL

Nathan Baum

Apr 12, 2005 at 11:24 PM

Well, there are only 190 Katakana and Hiragana glyphs, so keeping them in memory isn't that unlikely . On the other hand, there are over 2,000 Kanji glyphs. And there are many thousands of glyph for other languages.

What you need to do is cache the glyph images. Store the 512 most recently used glyphs in textures, and each time you need a glyph not in a texture, erase the least recent used one and draw the glyph into it.

yapposai

Apr 12, 2005 at 11:34 PM

also, most of the time you know beforehand
all the kanji you are going to use in the game so
making bitmap fonts is not that hard.

Nathan Baum

Apr 12, 2005 at 11:43 PM

Er, no. What if your game has a chat facility? Or some other reason it might be printing arbitrary sequences of characters?

shalrath

Author

shalrath

Apr 13, 2005 at 3:10 AM

thankyou for your responses, I've downloaded the freetype and ftgl libs, and I'm looking through them now. The final comment here is true of my situation, I want to have the ability to input any character, as I also want to use Korean and Chinese. And anyone with experience in Korean will understand what I mean by a complicated language to type on the computer, as is Chinese.

Thanks for your help again. I shall do what I can.

Topic Locked

This topic has been locked by a moderator. New replies are not allowed.