Drawing liquid text

Now Picture to People has a powerful tool to draw text made of liquid.

This new feature is very configurable, so you can draw liquid text in several styles and simulating virtually any kind of liquid material. This development wouldn't be possible if I hadn't developed my own font engine.

In fact, some of my testers around the world have already used this tool to make other kinds of beautiful texts that don't look like liquid. Sometimes a tool has so many freedom degrees that you can get even unplanned results.

I will show several liquid text examples in next posts. Anyway, you can get your own liquid text right now using Picture to People site.

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Font engine: example 5

Picture to People font engine is very evolved nowadays. It goes very beyond an usual font renderer.

Using my font libraries I can, for example, make uncommon vector based transformations over a text. The more important here is the transformed text keeps being an entity made of vectors.

Below you can see a simple text made using the canonical Arial font face. The second line shows the same text after a nontrivial vector based transformation.

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Font engine: example 4

Picture to People font engine can draw text outline natively. It can be made using any True-Type font.

It's one of the main features people usually miss in a "common" font renderer.

With Picture to People, this kind of drawing is highly configurable and you can even choose the line thickness.

Below you see a text outlined in three different fonts.

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Font engine: example 3

Picture to People font engine is powerful and scalable.

This example shows you how the text renderer can draw strange or complex True Type fonts with no quality losing.

This font engine forced me to improve some features to the extreme and these improvements will be useful for many drawing tasks.

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Font hinting

Probably you don't know, but all this text in tiny size is a very important example of Picture to People font engine.

This example shows a phrase written with several different fonts in size 8. My font renderer has its own hinting techniques and the output in good quality shows it can make the work. Font hinting is one of the hardest subjects about text drawing.

Sometimes the methods I use for hinting can not eliminate all little blur for some fonts in very small size, but for sure they help a lot.

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Font engine: example 2

Picture to People font engine can render fonts modifying them like you are used to: bold, italic and both.

As you can see, the font used for this example is not so simple as that ones from the first example. My font renderer can draw harder typefaces.

For now, I see no use to underline or strikethrough styles, so I will not implement them. I prefer implement more useful styles and transformations you can't find in other font engines.

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Font engine: example 1

Finally I can show some results about text drawing using only Picture to People software.

The text you see below was totally made with my own font rendering engine. For this, I have used two canonical fonts: "Arial" and "Times New Roman".

Realize the perfectly anti-aliased filling with no "blurred" appearance. I created a completely new robust algorithm for that with several important advantages. I tell more about that in future.

Despite its very professional quality, I will improve this library to very beyond a plain font engine.

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Picture to People discussion group

I have just created a group to Picture to People project.

There you can:

- tell about your experience using the project;
- ask for help;
- know what other users are saying about P2P;
- know about relevant anouncements I will post (if you wish, you will receive emails with a digest of the posts daily or weekly);
- suggest new features.

As you can see, it will work like a mix of forum, rss, ... So It can be worthy if you join. It's here: http://groups.google.com/group/picturetopeople.

For me, the last use of this new channel is the more important one. Now I have an "official" way to receive asks for new effects and new tools from Picture to People users around the world.

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The font engine is evolving

I'm facing well the hard challenge of have my own font engine. Some of my very low level libraries are been improved to achieve this goal.

Some of the main problems to someone trying to make this:

- TTF file format is weird and complex;
- font hinting is a very hard subject and trying auto-hint fonts is even worse;
- some fonts are very complex;
- there must be special care to draw fonts in small size; it can need proper algorithms;
- you should have a very complete, robust, and fast rasterizer behind you.

Some of my pieces of code are being stressed, but I'm glad about that. In the end I'm getting a general improvement in several low level libraries, what will help me in other developments.

In time: be patient. I will show you screenshots soon.

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Next challenging library: a font rendering engine

Now I'm working in an engine to render texts from scratch (from TTF fonts) with arbitrary vector based transformations.

Believe or not, it's a VERY hard task. The reason is not the transformations by themselves; the development of a complete font engine is a very complex goal.

In next posts, I will explain superficially why typography is a hard subject (despite the normal problems concerning professional Computer Graphics).

This library is one of the last low level tools I will need to create to use in a new and ambitious high level library. For now, let's keep it like a surprise.

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