QuesoGLC 0.5 review
DownloadQuesoGLC is a free implementation of the OpenGL Character Renderer (GLC)
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QuesoGLC is a free implementation of the OpenGL Character Renderer (GLC). QuesoGLC project is based on the FreeType library, provides Unicode support and is designed to be easily ported to any platform that supports both FreeType and OpenGL API.
QuesoGLC is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
The OpenGL Character Renderer (GLC) is a state machine that provides OpenGL programs with character rendering services via an application programming interface (API).
The character rendering services provided by GLC has some significant advantages over platform specific interface such as GLX or WGL :
The GLC API is platform independent. Since most nontrivial GL applications render characters, GLC is an important step toward the goal of truly portable GL applications.
The GLC is simpler to use. Only two lines of GLC commands are required to prepare for rendering characters.
GLC provides more ways to exploit the rendering power of OpenGL. For example, a glyph can be drawn as a bitmap, a set of lines, a set of triangles, or a textured rectangle.
GLC provides better support for glyph transformations. For example, GLC supports rotated text, which is unavailable in GLX.
GLC provides better support for the large coded character set defined by the standards ISO/IEC 10646:2003 and Unicode 4.0.1
GLC is a library that has been designed by SGI and that was only available on SGI workstations under IRIX 6.2 and later. The draft of the GLC specifications can be downloaded here. As far as I know, SGI dropped the development of GLC and the draft of its specifications has not evolved since late 1996.
Requirements:
QuesoGLC is written in ANSI C and should compile with any C compiler that is compliant with ANSI C standards.
OpenGL, FreeType 2 and Fontconfig are the only external dependencies.
So far, Fontconfig is mandatory in order to build and run the QuesoGLC library. However, it is expected that Fontconfig will become optional in the future.
What's New in This Release:
This release brings many improvements as well as bugfixes.
There are major speed improvements.
The texture code has been revamped for performance (use of a texture atlas).
Unicode support has been improved with the inclusion of the BiDi algorithm thanks to FriBiDi.
There are 4 new extensions: GLC_QSO_extrude, GLC_QSO_kerning, GLC_QSO_matrix_stack, and GLC_QSO_attrib_stack.
QuesoGLC 0.5 keywords