Processing 1.0 - Processing Discourse - processing and typography

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processing and typography (Read 2784 times)

buddafinger

processing and typography
May 4^th, 2005, 9:31am

I was wondering why the processing gurus orignally chose to use the visual language workshop font system instead of Java2D's. I've found Java2D to be a bit more flexible (but then again it's a dog to run).

If there was an explanation of this (not neccisarily long) it would give me an idea of which to use/choose in the future. I've thought that this was purely for latency issues with drawing through the J2D engine, but could be wrong.

Also are there any plans to automate a OpenGL texture based text rendering library into processing?

Cheers.

fjen

Re: processing and typography
Reply #1 - May 4^th, 2005, 2:07pm

not that i really know, but a guess would be:

http://processing.org/faq/platforms.html#java
Quote:

Java 1.1 ? this was the first truly usable version of Java. It's the last version of Java that was supported by Microsoft, but has since been discontinued because of a lawsuit by Sun. Informal estimates show that about 40% of web users that are using Java are still using Java 1.1. As of beta, Processing does not support 1.1 (it requires 1.3) but we hope that this is only a temporary change, because 1.1 support is obviously important.

so without java 2, no java 2 typography.

another thing might be that the fonts are travelling with the applets, creating .vlw fonts is somewhat half way sneaking out of the rights issue since they contain no vector-informations.

about lightweight and speed i'm not sure, might be a reason too, as well as the 3D-space ... ben, casey, anyone?

F

fry

Re: processing and typography
Reply #2 - May 4^th, 2005, 5:35pm

the processing graphics api was meant as a java 1.1 compatible, lightweight/speedy alternative to java2d. also, there's no way to know whether someone has the font installed that you request from java2d, so we use the .vlw fonts to pass around the bitmaps.

with the beta release, things are a bit backwards as we're now using a java2d renderer as the default (though we hope to bring 1.1 back). but we still don't support the font apis in java2d. we're working on using java2d for text when the installed font is available, but probably won't be going further than that.

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