Re: [Freeglut-developer] Font origin calls

[Richard R. <sf...@ol...>]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 07:11:34AM -0600, Fay John F Contr AAC/WMG wrote:
> Folks,
>=20
> 	I was wondering whether we had decided to put in the
> "glutBitmapXOrig", "glutBitmapYOrig", "glutStrokeXOrig", and

First: Is this metric per-character or per-font?  It would be
nice to have it be per-character (so that ' and g have different
vertical positioning information).  Of course, getting this on
a per-character basis might be difficult...I think that all
that we readily have is a per-font collection of information.
Getting per-character info would require some kind of analysis
of the fonts.  (Not too hard, I suppose, but extra work.)


Other than that, I will only repeat what I said last time, and to
which there was no followup (concurring or elsewise) that I recall:

 a) I don't see a need for the X-origin.  It is of some interest for
    general bitmaps, but is not so important for fonts.  Especially
    for the limited (Latin set only) fonts that GLUT supports.  If we
    were aiming for internationalization (e.g., right-to-left support
    for some languages, top-down for others; accents; non-Latin
    glyphs---not to mention rewiring our keyboard input) I could
    see this as a good generalization.

    I'd rather leave that out of the API.  We could always add it
    later if there was a desire to internationalize freeglut.

 b) Font metrics are often given in terms of width, height, and descenders.
    I think that a proposed name in place of the *YOrig() function was to
    use *Descender().  This would be the measure of the lowest point below
    the baseline for a given character (or generic for the font?).  It would
    normally be at least 0, but could be negative in principle.  (Negative
    would imply characters floating above the baseline.)

    Since we have width/height, I'd rather have the "descender" name than
    "yorig".  The "origin" names are really reference internal implementati=
on
    details that just accidentally seem to be what we want.


However, I don't feel too strongly about either of the above points, and
would like to see this feature added.


--=20
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/