[Cross-posted to the plib list, as this isn't entirely FlightGear specific. Dunno if that list allows posts from non-subscribers or not.]
The recent discussion about fonts got me interested in actually trying something, so I put together a perl utility that generates an antialiased Glut .txf font from any font that can be rendered in Postscript. It's worked out really well, so I generated .txf files for 33 standard postscript fonts (no Symbol or Dingbats, since those don't have ASCII encodings) and put them up with previewable images at: http://www.plausible.org/glut-fonts/ [Note: please be gentle with my cable modem and don't wget the whole page -- that's 2M of data or so and it will hose my 128kbps upload cap. Just look at the images and grab a few fonts that you intend to use. Or if you must grab everything at least mirror it somewhere. :)] I'm really happy with them. Things that make them better than existing fonts: + They are complete. Each one has glyphs rendered for every printable ASCII character. No more property confusion from different strings rendering identically due to missing glyphs. This alone is enough to make them worth the price of admission. :) + There is no reason in principle that other encodings (Latin-1, for example) couldn't be used instead. I was too lazy to look up the postscript glyph name to character ID mapping. The layout code doesn't care how many glyphs there are. + They are rendered and antialiased from vector descriptions, instead of being pixel-for-pixel copies of X11 screen fonts. So they look a lot better under most conditions (at very small sizes the difference is negligible as mipmapping does the antialiasing for you). + They have more space around the glyphs. Mark's program packed the glyphs too tightly togther; at small sizes, you could see "bleeding" in the textures from nearby characters. + They make better use of space in general. The characters are drawn as large as practical for simple layout code (i.e., I scale them up, but don't do any gymnastics like recursive packing or non-rectangular layout). So you get more font for your texture byte. Most of the existing plib fonts use only about half of the available texture space. + They're professional fonts. I don't know where "typewriter.txf" came from, but it's awfully ugly. I replaced it with the antialiased Helvetica, and things look *so* much nicer. The specific fonts used are the freely available URW fonts distributed with Ghostscript (and every Linux distribution), in case anyone is worried about the legality of redistributing font images. Stuff that isn't ideal: + They're stored as 8 bit gray scale images instead of bitmaps, which means that the files are significantly larger. The texture memory footprint is the same, however. + There's a bug in plib. The .txf format allows you to specify a logical "step" size (distance to the start of the next character) for each character, but plib ignores it. Instead, it uses the *physical* width of the character's bounding box, which isn't the same thing. Due to integer rounding errors at pixel boundaries, this means that some characters in some fonts get clipped at their edges because I can't pad the box size horizontally (I do pad it vertically). It also means that italic fonts (whose bounding boxes slant and thus pack together more tightly than their widths would indicate) tend to render badly in plib in general. I'll see about getting a patch to the plib folks for this. For most of the fonts, it's a minor issue. Anyway, try them out and have fun. Just copy "Helvetica.txf" on top of "typewriter.txf" in the Fonts directory of your base package. I won't check this change in because of naming -- Helvetica isn't monospaced, and shouldn't be called typewriter. The right thing to do would be to propertize/unhardcode the default font in the GUI code. The perl/postscript code is available too, if anyone wants to try generating their own font files. Be warned that it's a classic duct tape job, which expects to run on a reasonably recent Linux distribution and find ghostscript and Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
