Re: [Adonthell-devel] Try it's working ;)

[Alexandre Courbot]

> Yeah, it is quite cool; I tried it with the 'Adonthell' font 
> (inkburrow.ttf) and it looked impressive already. :)

btw, is this font freely redistributable? If so, can you please send it
to me? (we could also include it in the next release to do some killer
titles)

> I imagine the black border might come from libfreetype assuming that 
> the background is black (in which case a black border would make sense. 
> I haven't look into it, but there should be a way to change that.

That was exactly that. Actually, libfreetype gives its fonts in the
format of an array of bytes - 0 meaning nothing, 255 meaning full color,
while intermediate values can be interpreted as color-scales. You have
to deal yourself with the colors, it's not libfreetype's job. The
interpretation Joel did wasn't totally accurate, hence the black border.
I've changed the policy by deciding to draw a full-color pixel whenever
the color intensity was > to 128. This results in quite nice, one color
fonts which are very readable. Maybe we could next try to apply some
color gradients, or a black shadow to the fonts. I've made some tests
which weren't very convincing, but if someone gives it a serious look it
should be ok. Anyway, the fonts are looking good enough so we can work
with them - as soon as they are usuable from the window system, of
course ;)

The other issue was with the time font rendering takes. This is because
each time you build() the font, all the glyphs are rendered into images.
Depending of the font, you can have PLENTY of glyphs (the one Joel
attached had more than 500) and rendering is quite long - of course the
biggest the font is, the longer the rendering is. Joel's case is quite
extreme in that respect (the first font is very big). If we choose our
fonts correctly, we shouldn't have problems though. Or we could also
render the glyphs when they are used only, and keep them at hand for the
next time they are needed.

Btw, he did it again. "Kay" with an 'y'. He should be punished this time
;)

Alex.
-- 
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