Ideal D GUI Toolkit

[Kiith-Sa]

On Tuesday, 21 May 2013 at 00:05:21 UTC, Diggory wrote:
> On Monday, 20 May 2013 at 23:40:34 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
>> On 5/21/13, Adam Wilson <flyboynw at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Sub-pixel font hinting. Almost no games use this, and almost 
>>> every OS
>>> toolkit does.
>>
>> There used to be a nice article about font rendering in OpenGL
>> (methinks) here: 
>> http://h3.gd/dmedia/?n=Tutorials.TextRendering1
>>
>> But the link is dead. Most h3r3tic links are dead, not even
>> archive.org has them.
>
> Generally the idea is to pack the characters into a texture and 
> then render from that - it's very fast as you don't have to 
> switch textures which is relatively slow. There are a few 
> different ways of representing the characters (for large text 
> signed distance maps seem to be currently the state of the art) 
> while for small text a simple single channel alpha map is good 
> and fast.
>
> TBH the rendering itself is fairly simple, the hard part is the 
> layout, glyph conversion and kerning. It seems like the new 
> std.uni module actually does some of the glyph conversion which 
> is nice.
>
> Another technique that might be worth looking into is simply 
> getting the OS to render the text as it will be displayed to a 
> texture and then it's just a case of blitting that to the 
> screen. With some caching that could be efficient enough, most 
> gui text does not change very often, otherwise you wouldn't 
> have time to read it...

The code I linked to takes care of glyph positioning/kerning/etc; 
although I didn't test it with e.g. asian languages, and there 
might be bugs to work out there.