Re: [Freetype] Can I get FreeType to generate a bitmap (not including the space around it) of a specified size?

[Niklas Hoglund]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 02:00:00PM +1200, Henry Maddocks wrote:
> Unless I miss understand you, you are creating one texture per 
> glyph/character. This is NOT a good idea. This means that you will have 
> to do a texture bind for every character which is one of the slowest 
> operations you can do. It is far better to draw a whole font onto one 
> large texture then use the texture coordinates to draw the glyph.

This may be problematic on my hardware (Voodoo3) that has rather
limited maximum texture size. (256x256 pixels or something like
that).  I want to be able to zoom right up to the character and still
have it look smooth and fine.  The way I do it now works pretty well,
but the appearance could be better.  I'm thinking of using FreeType to
render all mipmap levels to get better appearance when the font is
zoomed out.  (Currently I use gluBuild2DMipmaps which scales the
bitmap I give it to a ^2 size, and then averages pixels together to
generate the smaller versions. Bitmap scaling can't be good for the
resulting quality. Sometimes I see artifacts I think come from this.

> This way will also make it easier to use ^2 texture sizes. Have a
> look at my lib to see how it can be done.
>
> http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/henryj/code/index.html
 
I've downloaded it and will check it out soon.

-- 
                                                Niklas