I'm writing a game with old school low resolution graphics. I'm using SDL2_TTF to render monochrome text but it doesn't seem to be hinted properly. I set the hinting with TTF_SetFontHinting(font, TTF_HINTING_MONO) and rendered the text with all three rendering functions (TTF_RenderText_Solid, TTF_RenderText_Shaded and TTF_RenderText_Blended) but I'm not happy with the results. Here's the output I'm getting from TTF_RenderText_Solid. The other functions output antialiased text.
And here's the output I want. This is Andale Mono 12pt (same as above) rendered by the Mac Terminal emulator and scaled up 4x.
The quality of the output does matter because the text is scaled up 4x when shown to the player. Why are they different? I thought that FreeType was the de-facto font rendering library so SDL2_TTF and Terminal would both be using it.
Am I simply using the SDL2_TTF library incorrectly?
I didn't want to mess with the SDL2_TTF library to achieve the effect I was looking for so I decided to find a different font that looks better. I found that if I chose a font that looks pixelated and render it at just the right point size everything looks fine.
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In my C++ project, im using OpenCV library to implement image processing algorithms.
I want to draw outline or shadow to texts that i drew on frames with using OpenCV's putText function. I have researched about it but only solution that i found is drawing the same text twice. This solution drops the FPS of my overall project because im drawing many texts on the frames.
Do i have to code a new font library for my project or is there any simpler solutions to it?
thanks in advance.
EDIT: I tried FreeType with different ttf fonts that i found in various websites. Yes, there are some fonts that has default shadow or outlines in it. The problem here is i can't change the colour of the shadow of it. Yes, i can change the colour of overall font but shadow colour becomes the same as the font. I want black or white shadow that can highlight the text.
The simplest thing to do is draw the text once to an empty image, say A. then mask your main image several times with A, shifting A as required.
You could use freetype. OpenCV can be compiled with FreeType which will allow you to load fonts from ttf files. then you can look up for a free font online which suits four needs of make your own ttf file.
Here is a link on how to use FreeType with opencv.
https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/d9/dfa/classcv_1_1freetype_1_1FreeType2.html
I've read Rendering Vector Art on the GPU on rendering shapes that are defined by quadratic/cubic Bezier curve boundaries. I was hoping to build off of this to create text that fills in as if it were stroked by a pen or brush somehow. (Any advice on how to do this is welcome.)
However, I'm a little unsure of where to get my hands on fonts / shapes that have the format specified in this paper (arrays of points representing quadratic/cubic Beziers).
Does anyone know of a way of getting font/vector drawings that are in this format? The authors of the paper mention truetype fonts, but according to
TrueType Font Parsing in C
it looks like parsing truetype fonts might involve a lot more than this? I know there are also formats like .svg, but I am not sure where to start with that, since it holds so much more than what I am looking to get out of it.
As an example, is there some type of file format that I could convert a .svg file or truetype file to, perhaps by using something inkscape's export function, such that the resulting format would be possible to parse for an array of points and control points?
I accepted an answer below, but for anyone interested in this, you should check out
https://github.com/quarnster/TTF
It's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. The code works great, but it's a bit hard to understand how to use it. It makes more sense if you read about the TTF format, like here An Introduction to TrueType Fonts: A look inside the TTF format.
I suggest using the cross platform library FreeType (http://www.freetype.org/). FreeType loads font files and, among other things, provides the bounding curves of glyphs in the typeface. Specifically, you should look into the function FT_Outline_Decompose, which gives exactly what you want.
I want to write a simple application using opengl under linux. I want to open the image and allow the user to interactively select a rectangle. After that user can save it to a specific location.
Could anyone give me the startup links or sample code.
From your question I take it that you think OpenGL was some kind of imaging library. This is not the case.
OpenGL is meant only for drawing nice pictures to the screen. It deals neither with image loading, or storing. It's also not meant for imaging operations like cropping (although this is actually quite easy to implement with OpenGL).
Regarding your question: OpenGL can be used for the "display the image" and "draw a rectangle around it" part. Loading and saving the image, and doing the actual crop is not to be done using OpenGL.
I have a few questions about using them both. At the moment I have a preexisting renderer I'm trying to use with QT and OpenGL.
A few questions are:
How can I get my results to draw in a QGraphicsScene? Is that even the right output to attempt to be using.
With OpenGL I want to be able to load textures and then be displayed in a window? Do I need to coordinate where to draw the texture or can I just say in the centre of a QWidget?
What paramenter would I usually need, I persume I need a Gluint for the texture, and then parameters for the size?
At the moment my results are quite poor, it seems to render something but basically not either in the correct window or not in the window of choice and basically it seems to 'hide' text e.g. hello, I can only see e. Odd I think.
I'm pretty sure this link will help you code with Qt and OpenGL:
http://wesley.vidiqatch.org/03-08-2009/nehe-opengl-lessons-in-qt-chapter-1-and-2
I used this and the NeHe tutorial to code a small Qt/OpenGL application, so all information you need is contained in both tutorials.
Does anyone have any tutorials/info for creating and rendering fonts in native directx 9 that doesn't use GDI? (eg doesn't use ID3DXFont).
I'm reading that this isn't the best solution (due to accessing GDI) but what is the 'right' way to render fonts in dx?
ID3DXFont is a great thing for easy to use, early, debug output. However, it does use the GDI for font rasterization (not hardware accelerated) and there is a significant performance hit (try it, its actually very noticable). As of DirectX 11, though, fonts will be rendered with Direct2D and be hardware accelerated.
The fastest way to render text is using what's called "Bitmap Fonts". I would explain how to do this, except that there is a lot of different ways to do implement this technique, each differing in complexity and capability. It can be as simple as a system that loads a pre-created texture and draws the letters from that, or a system that silently registers a font with Windows and creates a texture in memory at load-time (The engine I developed with a friend did this, it was very slick). Either way, you should see a very noticable performance increase with bitmap fonts.
Why this isn't a good solution?
Mixing GDI rendering and D3D rendering into the same window is a bad idea.
However, ID3DXFont does not use that. It uses GDI to rasterize the glyphs into a texture. And uses that texture to render the actual text.
About the only alternative would be using another library (e.g. FreeType) to rasterize glyphs into a texture, but I'm not sure if that would result in any substantial benefits.
Of course, for simple (e.g. non-Asian) fonts you could rasterize all glyphs into a texture beforehand, then use that texture to draw text at runtime. This way runtime does not need to use any font rendering library, it just draws quads using the texture. This approach does not scale well with large font sizes or fonts with lots of characters. Also would not handle complex typography very well (e.g. where letters have to be joined etc.)
With DirectX, the correct way to render standard fonts is with GDI.
However, IF
You want to support cross platform font rendering
with proper support for internationalization - including far eastern languages where maintaining a glyph for every character in a font is impractical
and/or You want to distribute your own fonts and render them without "installing" them...
Then libfreetype might be what you are looking for. I don't claim its easy: Its a lot more complex than using the native font api.
Personally I think that ID3DXFont is the way to go.
If you really wanted to make your own font routines, I suggest you look at:
http://creators.xna.com/en-us/utilities/bitmapfontmaker
You can use this to create a bitmap with all the characters printed on it. Then its just a matter or loading the texture and blitting the relevant chars onto the screen at the right place. (This is what XNA uses for its font drawing)
Its a lot more work, but you don't need the font to be installed on the target PC, and you have the advantage to being able to go into photoshop and edit the font appearance there.