Language-Specific OpenGL Fonts

< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >

‌Language-Specific OpenGL Fonts

SynthEyes uses a simple and fast texture-based approach to draw text in OpenGL windows such as the perspective and graph views, many on macOS. That scheme is limited to 256 characters (each in regular and bold), which is a far cry from the million or so used in Unicode. The built-in font is tailored for Latin-based languages.

Thoughts? We do have about 30 available slots for additional characters in the current OpenGL font image that we could deploy to reduce the number of characters that must have accents removed for display.

Replacement font texture maps can be used, so that words in languages based on other characters sets won’t be rendered with many bullets. This makes sense for Cyrillic, Greek, or phonetic Asian character sets, such as Japanese Hiragana or Korean Hangul separated into Jamo. (Full ideographic character sets such as Kanji are not practical with this approach.)

So far, we have created an alternative font for Hiragana; it is automatically used when Japanese is selected.

If you’re interested in additional fonts, let us know; we may be able to generate it, especially if it will impact many users, or show how it’s done.

< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >