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Re: The big divide - graphics contexts and window servers


From: Jeff Teunissen
Subject: Re: The big divide - graphics contexts and window servers
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 16:12:38 -0500

Adam Fedor wrote:
> 
> Jeff Teunissen wrote:
> 
> > "Philippe C.D. Robert" wrote:
> >
> >
> >>On Sun, 17 Mar 2002, Jeff Teunissen wrote:
> >><snip>
> >>
> >>>>The only problem is that it doesn't natively handle fonts, which is
> >>>>really important. There are libraries that add this capability to
> >>>>OpenGL, but the best ones are written in C++, which means I'll have
> >>>>to write some cumbersome wrappers (ok, NOW I want Objective-C++!).
> >>>>
> >>>It's not that OpenGL doesn't handle fonts -- it's that it doesn't
> >>>handle text at all. This isn't a bad thing, you just have to _want_
> >>>to reinvent the wheel.
> >>>
> >>Not if you use an existing solution for that purpose...
> >>
> >
> > ...but they all SUCK! :)
> 
> Do you know of a free graphics library that doesn't? Every one I have
> looked at has disadvantages.

What gave you the (mistaken) impression that I considered GL's lack of any
support for text to be a disadvantage? It's not. If GNUstep gets a GL backend,
it's beneficial that GL has no support for text itself -- nothing to get in
the way of Doing It Right(tm).

It's the available text systems for OpenGL that suck.

Sure, it _could_ be a problem that GL has no text support, but you can also
look at that as an opportunity. The real downside is that a quad (GL name for
any polygon with 4 vertices, usually represented internally as two triangles)
has either no textures or one texture attached to it, so a text window is
either one quad with a texture that needs to be redrawn and reuploaded every
time it changes, or a bunch of quads with a bunch of textures attached to them
(or one big texture using coordinates). You could go to the extent of
rendering the fonts into complex shapes, but that's very slow.

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
| GPG: 1024D/9840105A   7102 808A 7733 C2F3 097B  161B 9222 DAB8 9840 105A
| Core developer, The QuakeForge Project        http://www.quakeforge.net/
| Specializing in Debian GNU/Linux              http://www.d2dc.net/~deek/



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