CreateFont vs LoadFont

Android Processing

mithrarian

in Android Processing • 1 year ago

Hi to all,

I am trying to develop some simple app to my new Android Tablet and I found something weird.

Processing command window shows me this message when I use a .vlw font file loaded with loadFont:

"Inefficient font rendering: use createFont() with a TTF/OTF instead of loadFont()."

OK, so I switched to createFont with the proper .ttf system file put into the data folder (where the .vlw file is, too).

The fact is that using createFont with the ttf file has a slower performance than using loadFont with the vlw file.

Has anyone found this situation? Am I doing anything wrong?

Thank you very much for your help in advance,

Mith

Replies(6)

PhiLho

Not sure why this advice is given on Android. Perhaps a resolution issue, as each Android device is different?
A TTF file is indeed more complex than a VLW one, but it has one advantage: it is vector-based, so you can scale the text as much as you want, the rendering will be always perfect.

mithrarian

Re: Re: CreateFont vs LoadFont

1 year ago

I suppose that the font has to be rendered everytime it is shown, therefore consuming computation time, although gaining quality and flexibility. I think it is not advisable to use a ttf file if you want to show text with a fixed size.

Jesse Sco..

Re: CreateFont vs LoadFont

11 months ago

It's weird... I ONLY get this warning WHEN i use a TTF... never anything else - VLW or Android System Font...

dimkir

Re: CreateFont vs LoadFont

2 months ago

I have the same problem: rendring on my HTC desire VLW font at 30 fps, wherease when using TTF font, the frameRate drops to 5 fps (like 6 times slower).

And I also get this confusing message: "Inefficient font rendering: use createFont() with a TTF/OTF instead of loadFont()."

busdesign

Re: CreateFont vs LoadFont

2 months ago

Hi, I think the whole font problematic in processing and processingjs is a mess.
Shouldn't it be possible to just say createFont("sans-serif",12) and processing or the browser gets the default sans-serif font on the system (mostly Arial or Helvetica and Times for the serif one) like in CSS?
For custom Fonts the vlw-approach worked best since processing 1.5.1. Now I mostly use createFont("Dialog",12),
wich is the Java default sans-serif font and it works best in processing.
I think it would be consequent we could delare a processing.css file which is in the data folder to get the font we want.
And there should be a default for serif and sans-serif.
What do You think?

dimkir

Re: CreateFont vs LoadFont

2 months ago

I agree that font-situation in processing is a bit messy. But partially because the fonts-typography-rendering is a pretty sophisticated topic in itself, once you look under the hood.

IMHO from the first glancethe opportunity to use `createFont("sans-serif", 12)` seems nice and easy. But as Processing is mostly targeted at beginners - who may not know what a serif/sans-serif adding one more alias may be confusing. Now there will be 4 options:

createFont("font.ttf")
createFont("Some font name as called in the system");
createFont("sans-serif");
loadFont("font.vlw");

which adds (IMHO) even more confusion.

Plus another question: how will processing know which font to choose for which system? Arial as I know is not available on Linux? And I guess different linux distributions may have different fonts? Some fonts may be not installed or uninstalled on the system.

Next is Android mode. I don't know details of font implementations on android, but guess there _may_ be some simple solution for differentiating between serif/sans-serif.

The javascript versions? How can they differentiate?

But there're more serious problems: if fonts will be different from one platform to another this will lead to actual width of text be different. So If I put "hello world" in Arial on Windows and adjust size of font so that it is 800 pixels wide, then when I run my sketch on Android, the width of my "hello world" may be 850 pixels and part of the text will be off screen.

Another problem is: what if sketch makers actually don't care if it's serif or sans. But they are insteresting in using fancy "cool" fonts? At the moment processing (with a bit of acrobatics) allows to incorporate any font you want into your sketch.

So I guess the approach now, despite it's not perfect, is not that easy to improve or simplify.