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An Ultimate Font library? help please

Started by rein Dec 1, 2008 at 1:25 PM 3 replies 1.5k views

Original Post

Dec 1, 2008 at 1:25 PM

I think my head is going to blow up now. I've spent several days trying to find a reasonable TTF Bitmap generated-at-startup font library for OpenGL. What I seek is a library that will create a font from a given .ttf file and draw it as quads (or any other faster method) - both aliased and antialiased - that will look EXACTLY like on Windows. I don't want anything pregenerated in separate files and I don't use SDL. Let me share my findings: - Nehe Lesson #13 and wglUseFontBitmaps - precise, but no antialiasing and slow - FreeType2 - forced antialiasing (I've found of no working way to disable it) and unclear small fonts + the output differs from windows rendering - OGLFT, GLTT, FTGL and others - all share the above flaws the only technique I can think of is to somehow draw a certain font on a bitmap using GDI and then convert it to gl texture, storing all glyph metrics. But I'm green when it comes to windows-specific programming so I have actually no idea where to even begin I mean, on DirectX AFAIK it was easy as pie, there were no surprises. come on, isn't there a single polished library that will save me all the trouble? I was stuck on this one 10 years ago and after all this time, still I must deal with such tedious task, while there are tons of new stuff waiting to be leanrt :(

sprite_hound

Dec 1, 2008 at 1:34 PM

Erm. If you don't mind me asking... why?

You surely have no way of knowing whether a user has ClearType on or off, and therefore you can't know whether your font will look "exactly" the same anyway, no?

Kambiz

Dec 1, 2008 at 1:41 PM

There is also Bitmap Font Generator if you don't want to create the textures yourself.

rein

Dec 1, 2008 at 1:46 PM

I'm sorry, what I meant was not imitating actual user settings but only the pixel precision of the letters displayed in comparison to adequate rendering style (bolded, cleartype, italic) in Windows GDI.

I just noticed, that in nearly all libraries (mostly freetype2) output text of the same size, font and style looks a bit different than the same text in web browser, or notepad (like Verdana, size 9 for example - some letters have pixels in different places, letter spacing is off by a pixel here and there, some symbols semm to be truncated for example, or look wider than in GDI counterpart)

Kambiz:
but that requires me to pregenerate a file with glyphs and metrics and ship it with my program, right? what if I want the user to have the freedom to choose a font of his liking (i.e. by supplying his own .ttf file) ?
or you suggest reverse engineering this program? In that case, I'm afraid I'm not skilled to do that yet :/

rein

Dec 1, 2008 at 2:00 PM

heh few days wasted and now, after my act of desperation I've just stumbled upon exactly what I was looking for:

http://www.devmaster.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7991

I've quicktested it and voilla! it renders precisely the same image as GDI (now wonders if it's gdi based). I've yet to decipher the antialiasing and benchmark it

have any of you used this library ?

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