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[Freetype] The kind of anti-aliased colored fonts I'm talking about...
From: |
Pedriana, Paul |
Subject: |
[Freetype] The kind of anti-aliased colored fonts I'm talking about... |
Date: |
Thu, 6 Jun 2002 17:11:17 -0700 |
I posted last month lamenting the imability of font systems to support
colored alpha blended fonts. I also mentioned that in the game industry,
all the best quality games implement this. I thought I'd post a typical
example taken from Blizzard's Warcraft series of games. Here is a
typical screenshot of what I'm talking about:
http://www.blizzard.com/war3/screenshots/s14-large.shtml
Click on the image to see it at 100% scale. Click on the "next screenshot"
link to see other screenshots. Here is another example:
http://www.blizzard.com/diablo2exp/screenshots/800x/ss06b.shtml
This is the kind of text display we want and while standard TrueType and
PostScript text is OK and convenient, they are not as professional looking
as anti-aliased colored ("ARGB") text. I think that perhaps they lack the
support for ARGB because they were designed at a time when alpha was
considered somewhat exotic for realtime desktop computing.
The Freetype documentation for FT_Bitmap suggests that in fact colored
bitmaps are a possibility if a driver was written for such a thing. I
imagine
that this is the route I want to take. It seems that the num_grays field
would be meaningless for such a thing and that the pixel_mode field
would be set to some value defining the ARGB format of the bitmap.
As many people are aware, there are many common ARGB formats, such
as ARGB_8888, ARGB_1555, RGBA_5551, and ARGB_4444. The pixel
mode field, however, says how many bits there are, and says nothing about
what the format of the bits is.
Thanks.
- [Freetype] The kind of anti-aliased colored fonts I'm talking about...,
Pedriana, Paul <=