Having ported FT to Windows in the past, I would tell there is no much extra work you need to do to use FT under DirectX. My approach was to have renderings as cached as possible and then work with background blending for each case. In other words, you will have already rendered fonts, producing grayscale bitmaps on one side, and your DirectX display surface on the other side. Once you have both things, it will be as easy as deling with a grayscale bitmapped graphics o DirectX.
-----Mensaje original----- De: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] En nombre de Werner LEMBERG Enviado el: miércoles, 09 de enero de 2013 14:47 Para: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Asunto: [ft] FreeType and Direct X (was: License question) [CCing the freetype mailing list.] > However, there seems to be not a single project utilizing the FreeType > library in MS DirectX projects. I concentrate in DirectX in my engine > and so help here would have been useful... however, non-existent. Well, I'm working almost exclusively on GNU/Linux, and most contributors are also working on Unix-like operating systems. IIRC, there was not a single report on the FreeType mailing lists about using FreeType in combination with Direct X. I would be glad if you could share your experience on the list after you are done (this is, probably post a link to your blog describing the steps you've done to make FreeType work with Direct X)! > As suggested in many tutorials/examples I used the following approach > to get rendered glyph bitmaps: > > 1) FT_Init_FreeType > 2) FT_New_Face > 3) FT_Set_Char_Size (using height=16<<6 and hdpi=vdpi=96) > 4) FT_Load_Glyph (1~127) > 5) FT_Get_Glyph > 6) FT_Glyph_To_Bitmap > > The output from the bitmap buffer went into a A8R8G8B8 DX-texture and > is indeed rendered by the DirectX-engine, where i put the texture on > two triangles with dimensions equal to the font size I get from the > bitmap dimensions. > > Even after applying all possible filtering enhancements (linear, > bilinear, anisotropic,...) the results are bad. > > I tried various fonts (arial.ttf, msgothic.ttc, ObelixPro.ttf, etc.) > though. > > However, the bigger the font-height is set the more good-looking the > rendered bitmaps become. Arriving at e.g. 120<<6 the generated > bitmaps look VERY good already. > > However, I need small fonts and as it looks, scaling from 120 down to > 16 via the 3D-engines own scaling mechanisms only creates artifacts, > especially if filtering is applied. > > Is there no way of having Freetype create very clear bitmaps in the > small range of sizes (say font height 8)???? To get `clear bitmaps' you have to activate hinting with most fonts. Try, say, MS Arial which has excellent bytecode, and which should give very good results at small sizes. I suggest that you have a look how the demo programs like ftview or ftdiff work. There you can switch on and off the various rendering options. > I guess you would not know of any available book or tutorial for > Freetype in conjunction with DirectX????? Maybe other users can share some thoughts... Werner _______________________________________________ Freetype mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype _______________________________________________ Freetype mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype
