[vtk-developers] Unicode support for text annotations

[Sebastien BARRE]

At 3/24/2004 01:29 PM, David Thompson wrote:

>         I've filed a feature request for Unicode text support in ParaView 
> (but
>it would require changing VTK), because I want to include Greek
>characters (like rho) along with Roman text (like "Density") in text
>annotations in ParaView. I hacked a symbol font in the
>vtkEmbeddedFonts.h file, but I really want to be able to have both Greek
>and Roman characters together. It seems like the easiest way to
>accomplish this is to support Unicode strings in the VTK text mapper
>classes. It appears that ftgl supports Unicode, so it might not be that
>involved to add support in vtkTextMapper & vtkOpenGLFreeTypeTextMapper.
>Does anyone have objections or suggestions on how to go about this?

Hi David,

I'll rewrite a good chunk of the text mappers in May, so you might want to 
hold to that, and contact me at that point so that we can work hand in hand 
(I guess a new SetInput(w_char*) will be needed, since we need to keep the 
old SetInput(char*) signature). You are right, ftgl/freetype supports 
Unicode, and I think even some of the embedded fonts have a Unicode charmap 
already (and probably symbols).

BTW, we went into great length to find fonts that could be redistributed 
freely in VTK: some of them did fit the bill (Bitstream/XFree86), some 
others were donated by URW. I'm not aware of a good quality symbol font 
that could be added to VTK, but I'm planning to see if I can keep the 
vtkTextProperty::SetFaceFileName() method so that you can specify your own 
font file ! I hope this will do the trick for you.

Cheers,
Sebastien


--
Sebastien Barre