Re: [Plib-users] Hello Everyone

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

David Findlay wrote:

> - Can you use true type fonts with PUI?

Not really...well - sortof.

PUI can either use the yukky/slow built-in fonts that come with GLUT (I think FGFS
still uses GLUT - right?) - or you can use the PLIB FNT library to load fonts.

In principal, FNT can be handed any kind of texture map with associated information
about where the glyphs (character shapes) are within the map.

In practice, I've never heard of anyone using anything other than the standard
TXF font loader.

TXF fonts are basically just texturemapped fonts which could in principal be
generated in a variety of ways - although in practice, everyone uses the
original TXF generator written by Mark Kilgard.  That package is given any
X-windows font and renders it into memory and writes that out as a TXF file.

Then FNT (and hence PUI) can use it.

So, if Truetype fonts can be converted to TXF using Marks program (I think
that's possible) - then they'll work with PUI.

HOWEVER - I'm pretty sure that isn't actually the question you are asking.
I'm guessing you want truly scalable fonts that look good at a range of
resolutions.  The trouble with that is that it's hard-to-impossible to do
that at the blazing speed you'd need for most games applications.

I suppose one could try to use something like GLTT which renders TrueType
fonts using polygonal rendering under OpenGL - but you tend to get hundreds
of polygons per character which isn't much good if you have a lot of text
to render.

Anyway - there are no hooks to do that within PUI - so you are stuck with
what's currently possible.

> - On the puInput things, can you get rid of the cursor and only have it
> there when you click in the input?

You could do that outside of PUI by issuing X-windows calls to turn
off the cursor - and then turn it on again in the mouse callback if either
of the buttons are held down.  I believe there is a GLUT call to change the
cursor shape - and one option is no cursor at all.
 
Won't it be rather hard to know what you are clicking on if the cursor
only appears as you click?

Most games use some kind of toggle (either keyboard or mouse button) to
enable or disable the cursor.

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