[vtkusers] VTK 6 vtkTextActor Unicode status?

[David Lonie]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Sean McBride <sean at rogue-research.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I noticed this in the VTK 6 release announcement:
>
> "* VTK’s text rendering capabilities are greatly extended. In particular, text can be output to vector graphics friendly raw Bezier curves, system fonts may now be accessed through the FreeTypeFontConfig module, and mathematical equations can now be rendering using the matplotlib Python package."
>
> So can vtkTextActor show Unicode now?
>
> Obviously one would need a font with the desired characters/glyphs, but it seems the default OS font could now be specified... Does the SetInput() expect UTF-8 now?

Not at the moment. The default vtkTextRenderer implementation (which
uses vtkFreeTypeTools internally) has experimental support for
rendering unicode text to an image if an appropriate font is available
(IIRC, the Rendering/FreeTypeFontConfig module would be needed to get
a good font). However, the unicode rendering is not well-tested at the
moment and the text actors have not been adapted to use it.

Dave