Ideal D GUI Toolkit

[Diggory]

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...