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Antialiased text

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0 comments, last by lc_overlord 16 years, 10 months ago
Can anyone confirm that Lesson 13 (http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons/lesson.asp?lesson=13) is totally bogus when it makes references to antialiasing? The docs for wglUseFontBitmaps states that it creates display lists that each consist of a single glBitmap. glBitmap clearly says that each pixel has only two states: no action or draw current raster color. But antialiasing isn't possible with only 1-bit color depth. Can Lesson 13 be updated to clearly say that antialiasing is NOT possible with wglUseFontBitmaps? Also, can someone recommend the best text rendering method for my application? Here's a quick summary (it isn't a game but using opengl nonetheless): Embedded device: fixed-resolution full screen, downlevel graphics hardware (integrated Intel 8xx). I think the drivers are opengl 1.2. The bulk of the primitives are line segments to make grids, polylines (1000s of segments) with a couple quads (true rectangular) for background fills and a lot of text. A few icons (can be pre-rendered at fixed size or described with geometry). I also plan some layers with transparency and sliding motion, these have to contain text. I think this means I should render these ahead of the main scene and transfer to a texture or else render them in an aux buffer, in order to get consistent alpha blend and avoid clipping due to invalid raster position. Can't rely on any extensions, in fact with these drivers GL_LINE_STRIP doesn't even work (but GL_LINES with glVertexPointer and glDrawElements is plenty fast). Oh, and program startup time must be kept absolutely as fast as possible, whatever text drawing method is used mustn't have lengthy initialization. Any recommendations?
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The method in lesson 17 is pretty good, it gives a pretty good quality text with a form of antialising(linear filtering and or mipmapping), it doesn't use anything else than texturing and works on all openGL capable syetems.

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