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OpenGLEAN gleanfonts development
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OpenGLEAN gleanfonts Project

0.7 development

gleanfonts - GLUTted glyphs gleaned.

openglean_fonts.png

OpenGLEAN's gleanfonts in action

Introduction

OpenGLEAN is an open source project to enhance the GLUT API. gleanfonts is the isolation of the OpenGLEAN font support into an independent module. The codebase is inherited from:

Motivation

Part of the GLUT family

Why gleanfonts?

There are two users we are bearing in mind: Those who use OpenGLEAN and those who do not use any GLUT family member. Those who use OpenGLEAN may require some kind of font handling.

Those who use OpenGLEAN may require some kind of fonts, and may want something on the order as simple and portable as the GLUT fonts. As OpenGLEAN's core has deprecated the GLUT font API, some way of preserving the old API in amber, outside of the library core, is sought. gleanfonts fills that role.

Those who do not use any GLUT family member may want to add some kind of simplistic font support to their software, perhaps for a game. A heavy-handed font library may not be desirable, and something portable between various target platforms may be very desirable. gleanfonts is relatively lightweight (if you ignore the compiled in data), easy, and portable.

Because of the clean separation from unrelated code, all users should appreciate that they can remove font data that they don't want, add data for fonts that they think should be present, change the ranges of some of the character sets, readily add Unicode if that's their bag, and then static-link the whole thing. Distributed this way it is much closer to being a way for clients to supply/modify font data.

All users should also appreciate that the font support is deemed less than ideal by the OpenGLEAN project. The gleanfonts library may provide a newer font API. Basing such an API on model-space coordinates and textures (for bitmapped fonts) and on filled polygons (for stroked fonts) with a unified API for all fonts seems plausible. As does a means for clients to supply custom font data, or to retrieve "system" fonts (whether those are PostScript Type 1 fonts, True Type fonts, TeX/Metafont fonts, or X bitmapped fonts...). Such growth is in the future at this point, but is not likely to happen in GLUT or freeglut.

Features

The code started as an isolation of the traditional GLUT font APIs, as implemented in OpenGLEAN 0.5. This means that it is easy to learn and use the gleanfonts library, and if you know GLUT already, you need only use the gleanfonts header and library to use the familiar functions and fonts. From there, some enhancement has begun:

Counting sizes and variations as well as typefaces, there are approximately 90 fonts in gleanfonts, now.

The isolation of the fonts opens up room for clients to modify the fonts more freely than if the fonts are integrated into a monolithic "GLUT" library.

Some possible areas of expansion:

In addition, the OpenGLUT API proposals are still on the table and some relate to gleanfonts : gleanfonts API Proposals.

Using gleanfonts

Documentation

Examples and detailed API documentation are available from the SourceForge project interface for OpenGLEAN.

Download

Currently, development releases are made from time to time. See the OpenGLEAN file download section, e.g., at the OpenGLEAN SourceForge interface.

Developers

The current API of gleanfonts is source-compatible with the GLUT font API, but not binary-compatible.

The motivation for the OpenGLEAN project group API is to make OpenGL based development easy, productive and reliable. We would welcome feedback in relation to API proposals, results with using OpenGLEAN in applications, and feature requests or proposals. There may well be functionality in your own application that could serve a broader long-term purpose.

CVS

gleanfonts is maintained in the OpenGLEAN CVS repository on SourceForge.



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Generated on Sun Sep 18 12:47:04 2005 for gleanfonts by doxygen 1.4.3
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