Re: [ft] FreeType and Direct X (was: License question)

[Takeyoshi Kobayashi]

Daer All,

thank you for all the input and suggestions.

My engine still is based on DX9 though...

I wanted to have an easy font-system in my engine without the need for shaders.

For text I am using the default DX9 TnL machinery and I was able now to solve my problems.

I noticed that using single DX-textures for each glyph was not only a waste of resources and performances, it also introduced hacks to avoid artifacts on the textures borders if filtering was applied.

I have now an extremely simple bin-packer (since the one suggested by the paper written by Jukka Jylaenki packed the glyphs to tightly and created nasty overlaps...) which adds a single-pixel (variable though) border around each glyph and then puts them into the grand glyph texture map (I think I saw places call this texture a "glyph atlas" sometimes???), and finally generates u/v tex coords.

Selecting font sizes 8-120 with anisotropic or linear filtering looks on any resolution and font size really really good now.

Even without hinting etc. applied.

It's simple and quite fast.

Once I figure out how outlining works I will create a small DX9 demo (since DX10/11 is backwards compatible, it will also compile with those folks) that only uses default very easy TnL rendering for text. 

Many thanks so far,

Best

Takeyoshi

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 12:06 AM, Leo Hourvitz <address@hidden> wrote:

Takeyoshi -

I've used FreeType on Windows at small font sizes on previous projects with no problem (albeit that was a few years ago).  While I personally haven't used it in a DirectX project, a web search for "FreeType DirectX" shows a number of folks who report success with it, including at least one with sample source code:

    http://isometrictiger.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/font-rendering-in-direct3d-11/

I haven't compiled and run that code, but it looks like exactly the example you were asking for.

Leo