Type and Mipmaps
A lot of times people tend to forget about the importance of type support. Some have poor font rendering, but most don’t support things like kerning or ligatures. Not supporting kerning is just unacceptable. We made sure we have great type support in E15, and we do. E15 can render TrueType, PostScript and OpenType, all with kerning, ligatures and for OpenType, unicode support. The font rendering is also nice thanks to CoreText and Quartz. Here are some screen captures.
While adding support to text, we discovered that our mipmaps weren’t working. We noticed a lot of scintillation effects from the texts drawn in the environment. We are using NPOT textures, and after a couple days of going back and forth about whether NPOT mipmaps were possible or not, we finally figured it all out. As long as ARB_texture_non_power_of_two extension is supported, NPOT mipmaps will work just like POT. The trick is to use GL_TEXTURE_2D and treat NPOT just like POT.The other problem which hopefully is fixed with the official release of Leopard is that our ATI X1900 does not support hardware mipmap generation. Instead, we have to call gluBuild2DMipmaps(). The NVIDIA 7300 however does support it.
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:27 am
I wonder why you chose German text in your examples. Is E15 driven by German students?
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:23 am
The text is German, since I took some words out of Müller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems. German words work well for type specimen because they have many words with lots of characters. It also uses accented characters.
I should make a Japanese specimen to show support for two-byte characters.
None of us are German. I’m Canadian, Luis is Mexican and Kyle and Kate are American. But we do like Germans!