Re: [Opengrads-devel] GrADS and TTF

[Arlindo da S. <da...@al...>]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 7:58 PM, Luiz Rodrigo Tozzi
<lui...@gm...> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm still working on the GrADS PHP documentation but a friend of mine asked
> me something and I think you are the best people to answer it.
>
> Is there any plans for GrADS and/or OpenGrADS to work with TrueType Fonts?
>
> Everybody knows GrADS has a "non trivial way" to deal with fonts and I was
> wondering how hard it would be to implement it.
>
> Maybe the right (and easier) way would be creating a TTF2GrADS executable to
> convert TTF to GrADS font file.
>
> What do you think? Is there any plans for it?
>

As you know GrADS renders its own font using very basic vector
graphics instructions (pen up/pen down a la turtle graphics).  My
recollection is that in the past (read: late 80's/early 90's) it was a
real pain to rely on "hardware fonts" and having GrADS do all the font
drawing was the only way to guarantee platform independency.  The
proper rendering of fonts with anti-aliasing and what not is tricky
business, it is not a simple matter of translating TTFs into GrADS
font format. One is better off relying on some of the excellent
libraries available for drawing fonts.

Matt Munnich contributed some FreeType support for v1.9 but to the
best of my knowledge I it was never incorporated in the main GrADS
codebase.  I believe Brian is doing some overhaul of the graphics
rendering in v2 which may include some support for TTF; I'm cc'ing him
as he may be able to give us an update.

    Arilindo

-- 
Arlindo da Silva
da...@al...