Re: [Opengrads-devel] GrADS and TTF

[Brian D. <do...@co...>]

I am looking at incorporating the Cairo package which includes font  
support (not truetype but freetype?) ... Brian

On Jul 13, 2008, at 8:45 PM, Arlindo da Silva wrote:

> 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...