Is there a retro "vector scan" style font rendering system for OF?

beginners
#1

Something that draws font strings very similar to Atari’s Tempest:

Maybe OF’s truetype could do this but I cannot find any ttf that look like this and I don’t want any volume to the lines of the letters/numbers when drawn at larger point sizes.

#2

Hi :slight_smile: You could look at which fonts Cool-Retro-Term uses:

Does that look like what you need?

If you want the glow and artifacts, you could study their shaders.

(it’s GPL licensed)

edit: oops… I didn’t understand the “I don’t want any volume” part, as it was not obvious from the image.

#3

I’ve used hershey fonts before –

you generally want to search for 'single line fonts" – there’s some different options out there.

#4

My friend Val designed a vector font for me to use with my laser projects (you can see it in this laser duck hunt game) - It probably needs fixing up a bit but I have the code for it here : https://github.com/sebleedelisle/ofxVectorFont.

#5

Very cool. I’ll check it out. Thank you!

#6

Wow, I like the font style. I’ll definitely add it to my code and see how it looks. Thank you!

#7

That laser duck hunt video was very cool and impressive. I added your source my code and it works. Thank you so much!

Adding the source I ran into a couple of things you may or may not care about.

void TextWriter::draw() tries to return a ofMesh object which does not compile. (I just commented the return value and it compiles fine now.)

In the TextWriter class definition declares a couple of methods that are not defined in rest of the project:
void drawGlyph(Letter&, ofRectangle);
void renderGlyph(Letter&, float, float);

bool smooth is also not used.

#9

thanks! Yeah sorry, honestly it was something I just stuck on GitHub but I didn’t really finish tidying it up… I should definitely do that! Not sure when I’ll get to it though so feel free to put in a pull request.

Seb