ofxFontSampler

ofxFontSampler is a TrueType Font (TTF) glyph path extractor and renderer designed to finely sample glyphes from a font.

It was somewhat inspired by Ken Perlin's blog post "Unfont Design".

Overview

The project consist of two parts :

FontSampler, a TrueType Font (TTF) file parser and a glyph path extractor designed to handle type 4 CMAP format and working as a standalone c++ library. ofxFontSampler, an openframework addons interfacing with FontSampler.

Example

The example consists of two demos you can switch using the mouse left-click. It relies on the ofxTriangleMesh addon to triangulate meshes.

Demo 1 : Latin charset letters

Display iteratively the 26 uppercase letters of the latin charset (A to Z) with different animated contour sampling.

Demo 2 : ofxRenderFont

Display a 3d text with dynamic extrusion on the z-axis using the ofxRenderFont utility class.

Limitations

FontSampler is intended to be used at the glyph (ie. character) level, you can certainly write text with it but no support is given. It was designed to handle TTF using type 4 CMAP (cf. TrueType Reference). Most TrueType fonts support it, but some don't. Composites glyphes, like letters with accent (eg. "é"), are not supported. It is more of a working prototype which would need work on the memory management side to be production ready.

References

• Apple's TrueType Reference Manual
• The OpenType Font File
• An Introduction to TrueType Fonts: A look inside the TTF format

Acknowledgement

The example is distributed with a typeface from GNU FreeFont used under the GNU General Public License. You can read more about it and obtain a free copy here.

License

ofxFontSampler is released under the MIT License.