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.