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c++windowsdirectxdirectx-9

DirectX 9 Font libraries?

I had a look at the Font class in DirectX Documentation and looked at this/these question/answers but they didn't satisdy my need.

I tried searching for "C++ DirectX 9 Font library" yet this didn't yield any useful results.

Are there any DX9 Font libraries available that, for example, can load TTF fonts (eg Arial) and then draw them on the screen?

The current class I am using does satisfy most of my needs but is buggy as hell :( (in terms of, when I alt tab a third party application in which I draw information, it crashes and it's somehow not in my DLL).

Solution

  • It's time to write your own bitmap font renderer! You will need:

    • Good font loader (FreeType)
    • Texture atlas: a big texture with all letters and a dictionary that holds metadata for each letter
    • some kind of Sprite batch: efficient sprite drawing

    Step-by-step:

    1. FreeType: load font file and render each character to small bitmap
    2. Your atlas creation: merge (blit) all small bitmaps into big atlas texture and store attributes (coordinates, size, kerning, other stuff) of each character in "atlas dictionary".
    3. Draw characters from atlas (using dictionary) using sprite batching

    Well, for a first time you can start from someting like: take character's bitmap from FreeType and draw it directly, but I think that performance will be very low.

    Update: Hard to write a small example on such a topic, but:

    • about font loading libraries you can read its docs
    • about atlases you can look Chad Vernon's blog. It's C# but syntax is easy to understand for C++ coder. BitmapCharacterSet in his code is atlas.
    • about sprite batching: check Frank Luna books and/or source code. In his small utils library he has a font renderer too