RE: [ft] Questions with freetype

[Fan Zhang]

Erik:

It is nice to see your result. Could you share your direct rendering code with 
us?

Thanks

Fan

-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Möller [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 6:16 PM
To: address@hidden
Cc: Fan Zhang; 'Mickey Gabel'
Subject: RE: [ft] Questions with freetype

Hi guys,

Here's a quick helpful push in the right direction. I wrote a small font
system a few months ago for an indie game I'm working on right now and had
to spend some time investigating this. The font system wraps up freetype2
and keeps cached bitmaps of the glyphs drawn with colored outlines and other
neat stuff expected in a game.
Rendering bold or larger font size characters and then subtracting with a
second pass gives horrible result... I've seen that done in some games and
that's really not the way to do it, you always end up with artifacts.
What you're looking for is freetype2's direct rendering which allows you to
get spans and their coverage (opacity). When you need to render a glyph with
a different colored outline you need to get the spans of the glyph and then
get the spans of the outline and blend your own image from that. Freetype2
only ever gives you shades of gray so you need to manage the color yourself.
You can even do gradients on glyphs this way. There's a bit of info here
http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-raster.html and once
you know "Direct rendering" is the answer to all you problems it just takes
a little bit of coding effort to get some really nice stuff going. Here's a
screen from the first test program I wrote
http://www.timetrap.se/post_images/font_outlines.png

I didn't really have a good code sample to submit here, but it's not that
hard. I think my font system turned out to be about 450 lines of code and
took me about a day to code up.

I hope that helps.

Erik Möller,
Timetrap
http://www.timetrap.se
http://www.emberwind.se


-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Fan Zhang
Sent: den 24 februari 2009 22:40
To: Mickey Gabel
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: RE: [ft] Questions with freetype

How about rewriting or implementing a new render function for hollowing?


-----Original Message-----
From: Mickey Gabel [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 9:26 AM
To: Fan Zhang
Cc: Werner LEMBERG; address@hidden
Subject: Re: [ft] Questions with freetype

On 25/02/2009 00:19, Fan Zhang wrote:
> One way I am considering is to use emboldening.
>
> Drawing a emboldening character in the bitmap buffer and erasing
> internal part with normal bitmap generated by ft2 engine.
>
> Did your guys try that direction?
>
> Thanks
> Fan

We haven't tried anything yet, this is all still in the 
planning/experiment phase, so for us it's still theoretical.

I think your approach will mangle characters with small details and 
holes, for example chinese characters.



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