A vector-ish format for fonts?

[Nash]

As some of you may (or may not) know, I have been dealing with high res fonts in (G)ZDoom a lot lately. I have spent an accumulated estimation of around 7 days font shopping, looking for a font that looks good and is resolution independant.

The problem with these high res fonts is that they look good at fairly high resolutions, and only in "clean" resolutions. If the user is using an "unclean" resolution, the fonts will be at the mercy of rasterization, and most of the time, it looks ugly. Low res video modes render the fonts downright useless and unreadable.

I had to go back and forth, keep changing the fonts, over and over again, because I couldn't find anything that looks the cleanest in as many resolutions as possible. Thankfully there's automation, so I could quickly put together the graphics (generated from bagheadspidey's ZDoom Font Generator), get some TEXTURES auto-generated for scaling, and put them in ZDoom. If I had to do these manually each time, I think I'd have commited suicde by now. XD

I am unsure of what kind of format to propose for ZDoom, or perhaps if there could be a converter written that converts standard TTF/OTF fonts into whatever vector format that can be used by ZDoom. I hope it's possible, because ZDoom is already doing vector graphics with the automap arrows, and I was hoping it wouldn't be impossible to extend that to draw fonts.

High res fonts are very important for modern-ish projects, such as the one I've been working on. Understand that I am suggesting this at the interest of users, who would no doubt have all kinds of different video modes. Had it my way, I'm totally content with my high res fonts and 1920x1200 resolution, though not everyone may have such luxuries.

Thank you for your consideration.

[cypherphage]

So are you suggesting adding something like SVG or TrueType support to textures lump and having (g)zdoom recalculate them based upon the current the resolution?

[Nash]

I'm suggesting a vector format only for fonts, not for the other graphics.

[Enjay]

I had a feeling this had been discussed before:

http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5677

The TTF related stuff starts later on. Unfortunately the thread deteriorated a bit so I'm really only linking to it out of "historical interest" than it having much in the way of real value for a request seven or so years later.

Seven years!

[randi]

TrueType support is pretty much mandatory for non-European characters anyway, so this was already planned for sometime in the future when ZDoom is strictly Unicode. (Considering that hardly anybody still uses ZDoom on Windows 9x, losing 9x support and gaining Unicode support doesn't seem like too much of a bad tradeoff.)

[Kate]

TrueType support is pretty much mandatory for non-European characters anyway, so this was already planned for sometime in the future when ZDoom is strictly Unicode.

[randi]

☃☁☆☀★☼

...and how one would go about easily writing those without an IME, I don't know. ☆彡

[Graf Zahl]

TrueType support is pretty much mandatory for non-European characters anyway

Better say 'Western-European'.
Most Eastern European special characters are not supported right now - and even French has one that's not in the standard code page (Œ, œ)