Wednesday 14 May 2014

FontManager enhancements

Thanks to Richard9 on the forums who gave me some good ideas for enhancing the font library. It now supports the following

  • Multiline text - separate with \r or \n - this only works in forward or backward orientation ; vertically orientated text doesn't start a new line.
  • Support for extended characters. Originally it just used unicode strings (e.g. 0-255) but it can now cope with UTF-8 strings up to two bytes long - if anyone wants three or four byte UTF-8 characters please let me know and I will code it.  These are still, however, converted to unicode characters, all the font designers use unicode as far as I can tell !
  • Word and Line effects. So for example, pulse originally operated on individual characters, now you can easily pulse words in a line, or lines in a multiline, or do anything with it really :)
Richard also suggested tinting characters, which I will experiment with. I'm not totally convinced what the API should be yet, but it will be consistent with the multi-level design.

One feature of the multiline text is that in bmglyph and Glyph Designer fonts the height is often more than you think it is - there seems to be a tendency to have odd characters will really low descenders or high ascenders (?) especially if you use exotic fonts. This means the text in multiline text is further apart than looks natural. 

This actually threw me for a while, I was sure the spacing had to be a bug. It wasn't until I looked at the .FNT file that I actually realised it was right.

However, to fix this there is a new method setVerticalSpacing(scalar) which is a scalar (default value 1) applied to the vertical spacing so you can squeeze or stretch this to your hearts content.


You can see most of these things by running the main.lua and experimenting with it.

https://github.com/autismuk/Font-Manager

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