On Tuesday, 21 May 2013 at 00:05:21 UTC, Diggory wrote:
On Monday, 20 May 2013 at 23:40:34 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
On 5/21/13, Adam Wilson <flybo...@gmail.com> wrote:
Sub-pixel font hinting. Almost no games use this, and almost
every OS
toolkit does.
There used to be a nice article about font rendering in OpenGL
(methinks) here:
http://h3.gd/dmedia/?n=Tutorials.TextRendering1
But the link is dead. Most h3r3tic links are dead, not even
archive.org has them.
Generally the idea is to pack the characters into a texture and
then render from that - it's very fast as you don't have to
switch textures which is relatively slow. There are a few
different ways of representing the characters (for large text
signed distance maps seem to be currently the state of the art)
while for small text a simple single channel alpha map is good
and fast.
TBH the rendering itself is fairly simple, the hard part is the
layout, glyph conversion and kerning. It seems like the new
std.uni module actually does some of the glyph conversion which
is nice.
Another technique that might be worth looking into is simply
getting the OS to render the text as it will be displayed to a
texture and then it's just a case of blitting that to the
screen. With some caching that could be efficient enough, most
gui text does not change very often, otherwise you wouldn't
have time to read it...
The code I linked to takes care of glyph positioning/kerning/etc;
although I didn't test it with e.g. asian languages, and there
might be bugs to work out there.
