Re: font glyphs on different hardware
Re: font glyphs on different hardware
- Subject: Re: font glyphs on different hardware
- From: James Maxwell <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2010 13:26:08 -0700
Ah, sorry I didn't see these posts until now.
Sound like good recommendations. For the time being, I don't mind relying on a specific font, but I'll look over the SpeedometerView example, and see about implementing this at a higher level.
Thanks for the tips.
J.
On 2010-06-01, at 9:10 AM, Douglas Davidson wrote:
> Let me second Alastair's recommendations. Our standard developer example for this sort of thing is in the SpeedometerView example code, in the SpeedyCategories.m file; take a look at the BezierConversions category on NSString, and the associated BezierNSLayoutManager.
>
> Douglas Davidson
>
>
> On Jun 1, 2010, at 2:11 AM, Alastair Houghton wrote:
>
>> Normally you'd be drawing using higher-level APIs that take Unicode code points/units rather than glyph indices; in that case, if you *really* needed a glyph ID for some reason, you could get NSLayoutManager or Core Text to map your Unicode data to glyphs for you.
>>
>> Mapping glyphs yourself is a little on the painful side; it *is* possible to do it, but you'd have to grab the font's tables and parse them yourself... I wouldn't recommend it if you can get something else to do glyph mapping for you. Further, if you want to support advanced layout features like OpenType or AAT, it will rapidly become an *extremely* unpleasant and complicated exercise.
>>
>>> Simple question: since using the Glyph ID (i.e., from the Character viewer) directly at least **works**, is there any real reason why the same font, on different systems, would have different Glyph IDs for the same character? Or was this possibly just some form of font corruption?
>>
>> The glyph IDs are generally speaking up to the font; there are a few predefined ones - 0 is reserved for the undefined/missing character glyph, and index 1 is the null glyph.
>>
>>> If looking up the Glyph ID and using it directly is supposed to be safe across machines, I'll just go back to that, as this glyphWithName business is way too annoying...
>>
>> If you can guarantee that you're always using the same version of the font, and nobody is going to change the glyph IDs, then you can use them directly if you must. However, if the font you're using supports it, you'd be better off using the Unicode "Musical Symbols" block at U+1D100, because that frees you from relying on knowing specific glyph IDs; it also means you can use the higher-level rendering machinery, which gets you all kinds of advantages like automatic support for kerning, ligatures, positioning and so on.
>
James B Maxwell
Composer/Doctoral Student
School for the Contemporary Arts (SCA)
School for Interactive Arts + Technology (SIAT)
Simon Fraser University
email@hidden
email@hidden
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