First, CVSreport failed on my last commit, here's the ChangeLog :
2003/05/04 02:56 zerodeux
- renamed MSVC6 project files
* s/dllngl/libngl/ (DLL target)
* s/libngl/libngl_static/ (LIB target)
(that's cosmetic, but when patterns are very uniform it makes packaging easy to
read
and maintain, same thing with lowercasing)
Questions :
* What about an examples.dsw which gathers the .dsp in examples/ ? (with static
linking I guess)
* What's the status of wizard/ ? I guess there's no point in including it in the
source distribution as of today ?
I'd still like to do an online wizard in PHP which asks the basic questions and
builds
the full building framework (msvc6/7/autotools/etc) : easy to write and
immediately
runnable by everyone. I was waiting for the stabilization of the build details,
especially autotools. That's something that should be done shortly after the
release I
think (easier than deb-packaging ...).
* What's the status of Mac/CW build ?
* As for the autotools build under MacOSX, if I can log on a Macbox with a
fresh Fink
install, I'd be glad to do the port.
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Date: Sun May 4 04:25:41 2003
X-Original-Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 13:23:36 +0200
Vincent Caron wrote:
>First, CVSreport failed on my last commit, here's the ChangeLog :
>
>2003/05/04 02:56 zerodeux
>- renamed MSVC6 project files
> * s/dllngl/libngl/ (DLL target)
> * s/libngl/libngl_static/ (LIB target)
>
>(that's cosmetic, but when patterns are very uniform it makes packaging easy
>to read
>and maintain, same thing with lowercasing)
>
>
>
Ok.
>Questions :
>
>* What about an examples.dsw which gathers the .dsp in examples/ ? (with static
>linking I guess)
>
>
Not sure there is still much interest in VC6 right now. At least not on
my part (both personally and professionaly).
>
>* What's the status of wizard/ ? I guess there's no point in including it in
>the
>source distribution as of today ?
>
>
>I'd still like to do an online wizard in PHP which asks the basic questions
>and builds
>the full building framework (msvc6/7/autotools/etc) : easy to write and
>immediately
>runnable by everyone. I was waiting for the stabilization of the build details,
>especially autotools. That's something that should be done shortly after the
>release I
>think (easier than deb-packaging ...).
>
>
The half started wizard should get shot :). It is only compatible with
VC6 and yet not working. I don't plan to make it work at all in this
life or in another. Let's remove it and add something better later (PHP
could be cool, local scripts/pgms could be quite nice too...).
>
>* What's the status of Mac/CW build ?
>
>
It compiles OK on Metrowerks Codewarrior, both in MachO and classic
mode. However the gcc build is broken (as you know :).
Feature-wise it's far from complete:
- no timers (but nglTime is ok)
- not sure about the idle loop, should be ok.
- not all mouse and keyboard handling is done (a god keyboard map is
really missing and I didn't find a way to get low level keyboard event
for dead keys)
- POSIX file handling is wokring OK in OSX MachO, however there is no
support for FSPecs right now (my colleague Jankoen is considering adding
support for this but I don't think he started to work on it).
- no fullscreen support.
- context creation is very basic
To say the least the mac version is more a proof of concept that a
working ngl implementation. As i'm working extensively on OSX (even more
than on Win32) for the moment, and learning every day new tricks, there
is hope for this target :).
>
>* As for the autotools build under MacOSX, if I can log on a Macbox with a
>fresh Fink
>install, I'd be glad to do the port.
>
>
Be my guest :). (just do as usual, the mac is allways online when I'm at
home).
MeeLoo
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Subject: Re: [NGL-devel] Windows & Mac
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Date: Sun May 4 07:14:48 2003
X-Original-Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 16:08:36 +0200 (CEST)
>>* What about an examples.dsw which gathers the .dsp in examples/ ? (with
>>static
>>linking I guess)
>>
> Not sure there is still much interest in VC6 right now. At least not on
> my part (both personally and professionaly).
OK, forget it.
>>* What's the status of wizard/ ? I guess there's no point in including it in
>>the
>>source distribution as of today ?
>>
> The half started wizard should get shot :). It is only compatible with
> VC6 and yet not working. I don't plan to make it work at all in this
> life or in another. Let's remove it and add something better later (PHP
> could be cool, local scripts/pgms could be quite nice too...).
OK, it's going to die in the next hours.
>>* What's the status of Mac/CW build ?
>>
> To say the least the mac version is more a proof of concept that a
> working ngl implementation. As i'm working extensively on OSX (even more
> than on Win32) for the moment, and learning every day new tricks, there
> is hope for this target :).
OK, that's work in progress so I don't include conditions on the Mac build for
the
next releases.
>>* As for the autotools build under MacOSX, if I can log on a Macbox with a
>>fresh Fink
>>install, I'd be glad to do the port.
>>
> Be my guest :). (just do as usual, the mac is allways online when I'm at
> home).
Hum, OK, watch out your CPU cycles sinking without notice :)
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Subject: [NGL-devel] About fonts
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Date: Sun May 4 16:14:06 2003
X-Original-Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 01:13:25 +0200 (CEST)
I'll try to put here some plain facts which are not in the reference
documentation.
Hopefully this will give us a common vocabulary and help to foresee what's left
for
the integration of a font service in NUI. I explaned the first paragraphs to
Meeloo on
IRC but they are there for the record and completeness (anticipating RTFMs :)).
--
First definition : family. A font family is what you would call a 'font name',
eg.
'Arial', 'Tahoma', etc. There is a category one level up called 'foundry',
which most
of the time is the name of the company who did the font design. Some families
have a
wealth of different implementation/designs, for instance a serious foundry will
have
several dozen of 'Times' variant. Two typographers could hardly be sure to talk
about
the same font when they only specify the foundry and the family, but for our
technical
purposes that will be OK :).
Second definition : a face (or typeface). This is a stylistic variation of the
same
family, most of the time with a different slant (roman/italic) and/or different
weight (medium/bold). A well designed font family will have each of its face
designed
manually; a digital font family is often made up of 4 faces : roman/medium,
roman/bold, italic/medium, italic/bold. A face is implemented as one font file
(true
for all formats, including TrueType), thus nglFont is an abstraction of a
single face.
It is possible to synthetize italics and/or bolds faces from a single
roman/medium,
but the result is most of the time not satisfying, because hinting is still
better
handled manually (as of today; this is slowly changing with smarter
autohinters).
Technically, nglFont cannot synthetize such fonts right now. Here is what is
possible
:
- FreeType easily supports a usermade 2x2 transform matrix, doing italics is a
matter
of building a shearing matrix from a given user angle. A
nglFontBase::SetMatrix()
could do the trick.
- FreeType as an experimental support for enboldening, using a different
rasterizer
called a 'path stroker'. I did not tested it nor do I know the interface to it.
Before we get into font selection, let me put some details about nglFontCache. A
nglFont instance can accomodate one nglFontCache, and for now the default
nglFontTexCache only works consistently with fixed settings. In other words,
when the
cache is activated, font size, rendering flags and optional shearing matrix
should not
be changed, unless the cache is explicitely flushed when such a feature is
changed. In
a rich UI environment with frequent font style changes, this would be
suboptimal.
The idea is to use the lightweight nglFont copy constructor : the cloned
objects will
share the same FreeType ressources, but can have their own features
(size/rendering
flags/etc) and own texture cache. We would have to manage a collection of
nglFont
objects for a single face, handling different sizes and optional synthetized
styles.
The right design would be a cache such as FreeType's one : it's a big glyph
bucket
which maps a request such as [face, size, rendering flags] -> [glyph bitmap &
metrics]. Which gives a nice generic interface and a small memory granularity
(per-glyph allocation). Sadly I can't see how to implement this easily and
efficiently
with GL textures. The ideal solution would be GL handling efficiently a bunch
of small
pixel-sized textures, ie. one per glyph (because 2D garbage collection is not
the user
job, we don't even have the proper interfaces to do it; 2^n sizing sucks to
begin
with).
--
Font families are often declined in typographic variants, known as :
- 'Sans Serif' or 'Sans', this is what we mostly use on computer screens
because
serifs are small features hard to render low resolution devices (yes, screens!)
and
hinder legibility. Eg.: Arial, Tahoma.
- 'Serif', what is most used on books or newspapers. Eg.: Courier, Times. This
is
really what you expect on paper, that's why Word documented printed with Arial
looks
so un-professional (and MS Times New Roman is not good looking either).
- 'Monospace' or 'Mono', comes from the typewriter world, and of course makes
a ton
of sense on computers, especially for programmers :). There are serifed
monospace
fonts (Typewriter), and sans monospace (Fixed, Console, etc). Most of the time
we
expect Sans in this category, at least in the computer world.
Most font families are primarily designed for a particular variant : for
instance
Arial is meant to be as Sans. Some foundries will provide Serif'ed Arial. Some
font
families are designed for all variants, bundled for a global consistant look;
this is
the case of the Bitstream Vera font family, which commes il all variants,
slants and
weights (actually 10 faces in place of the 12 expected, Serif italic is
lacking).
--
Now I think that all details are settled to talk about font selection.
For the selection interface, I'd go as other APIs (MS and FreeType), ie. put
everything in the font descriptor, and let the user easily create a font object
from
these parameters. They are :
1- family name
2- slant
3- weight
4- size
5- rendering flags (aa, hinting)
6- striking (underline, overstrike)
7- color
[... future]
