Texture fonts: Small texture, A lot of Characters - Graphics

Chameleon wrote:

> I call it "masochism" but it works fine!
>
> http://programs.agiasofia.gr/?program=22

This site claims:

| Its hard for CPU or graphics card to render real time a vector
| TTF truetype font with OpenGL.

This is absolutely not true. Vector Fonts are stored as bezier
patches or outlines, for which efficient tesselation algorithms
exist. Rendering an antialiased font with OpenGL can be a bit
tedious however, if one desires subpixel hinting, but it can be
done.

I have abandoned using texture mapped fonts, since I18N is
difficult to get right and non latin fonts may require an awfull
lot of texels/memory.

Instead I now favour to render whole texts into textures. On
systems w/o FBO support by rendering into an image using
freetype, that is then uploaded to a texture, on systems with
FBO the text gets rendered with OpenGL itself.

Wolfgang Draxinger
--
E-Mail address works, Jabber: hexarith@jabber.org, ICQ: 134682867

Wolfgang Draxinger wrote:

> Chameleon wrote:
>
>> I call it "masochism" but it works fine!
>>
>> http://programs.agiasofia.gr/?program=22
>
> This site claims:
>
> | Its hard for CPU or graphics card to render real time a vector
> | TTF truetype font with OpenGL.
>
> This is absolutely not true. Vector Fonts are stored as bezier
> patches or outlines, for which efficient tesselation algorithms
> exist. Rendering an antialiased font with OpenGL can be a bit
> tedious however, if one desires subpixel hinting, but it can be
> done.
>
> I have abandoned using texture mapped fonts, since I18N is
> difficult to get right and non latin fonts may require an awfull
> lot of texels/memory.

Nevertheless does Freetype 2 use a glyph cache because it is faster to just
copy an image instead of rendering it twice. So the link postet by the OP
is quite interesting, since it can be used to implement a nice glyph cache.

Arne

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