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« on: December 14, 2009, 03:34:23 pm »
17. Is it possible to perform styling (like oblique, italic, bold,
underline, etc.) with FreeType?
Actually, these refer to very different things:
- Italic and Bold styles usually mean many variations from the
'Regular' font. This is why you normally need a proper font
file for each of these. For example, the MS core font Times
comes in the following TrueType files:
TIMES.TTF Times New Roman Regular
TIMESI.TTF Times New Roman Italic
TIMESB.TTF Times New Roman Bold
TIMESBI.TTF Times New Roman Bold Italic
(sometimes named TIMESZ.TTF)
With FreeType, you simply need the required font file to use it.
- Oblique style refers to a transformation that is applied to a
regular font in order to make it 'slanted', likes italics do.
However, an italic font very frequently contains small but
important variations that cannot be produced by this method and
make the font more appealing.
Slanting can easily be done with a transformation under
FreeType, with the exact same process as rendering rotated text.
Please read the "glyphs" documentation file where it is
explained in details.
Usually, Windows or the Macintosh produce oblique versions of a
regular font when the corresponding italic TrueType file isn't
available. They also stretch horizontally regular fonts when
the bold one isn't available. All of this can be done with
trivial transformations.
- Underlining and stroking, are not really part of the glyphs.
They're simply lines that are printed on the glyph after it has
been rendered. Each TrueType file provides, in its OS/2 table,
which is accessible through the face object properties in
FreeType, several values that define the position and width of
those lines, in notional font units.
If you want to use them, you'll have to scale these values to
your current instance/point size, then draw the lines yourself.
I really didn't know that there is no support for making bold, italic and underline font faces in freetype 2 library. Now, after some look at your code I finally understand why you use such tricks to render proper text. It would be difficult to do further optimizations in the source code. But I suggest you mentioning in documentation to use specific font files if possible (Arial Bold, Arial Italic) instead of using sf::Text::Style.
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For example user want to do effect which looks like:
The problem is that this function looks like a "scaling" one. In SFML 1 i used it a lot (but had a different name I think) so others also can misunderstand its meaning.
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