Text-image rendering

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

Hi Everyone,

I’m having a hard time figuring out the best way to render textures containing text images.
I’m talking about textured quads or textured cubes with a different text-image mapped on each face.

In particular I don’t know how to handle heavy minification scenarios: I tried trilinear filtering, anisotropic, different lod bias and [min level, max level] configurations without success (almost).

When using point sampling the texture is sharper and somewhat more readable compared to other methods, however there’s a lot of flickering when the textured objects moves.

When using tri/bilinear or anisotropic sampling the result is indeed more pleasing to the eye and the flickering is reduced but the text becomes too blurry to be read.

This is an issue when the approximate screen height of the text is about 5/15 px.

This is an example texture and it’s auto generated mipmaps.
I’m using the alpha channel (here shown as transparency) to interpolate between a background and a text color in my application.

Snag_4483e030
Snag_4483e0301502×379 4.79 KB

What options do I have to display better texts while still using this same approach (textured quads)?

2

  1. Don’t make your text that small.

  2. Use a different texture (or set of rasterized glyphs within the same texture) that is designed to be that small. Fonts can be designed to look good at low resolutions, but this is a property of font rasterization. If you’re using FreeType2 for example, you tell it how big to rasterize each glyph. If you give it a relatively low resolution, then it can employ tricks that will allow it to make that glyph look as good as possible for that resolution.

    Note that this will also improve things like kerning and the like compared to scaling an output glyph.

    Basically, try to avoid scaling the result of glyph rasterization. You can’t avoid it always, but if you have extreme minification, using different glyphs is the way to go.

1 Like
3

First off you can choose a good arbitrary size for each glyph to begin with, this might take a bit of tweaking at first, but ultimatelly it all depends on your current goal, keep in mind that this is not an all purpose fits all kind of approach, each aplication has its own needs, but picking a size of let’s say 64px (and then rescale it down to what fits best) for each glyph is fairly ok to many applications the intent to show HUD text at a usual size.

Then you can use a set of tricks to prevent flicker and blured contours, such as:

glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);

This will give you the retro, pixelated style (when using small fonts) or a sharp/clearer end result (when using bigger fonts), but although this can solve some of the previous issues, it goes with other set os problems itself when rasterizing it.

You can also try to check on the Distance Fields (or Signed Distance Fields) font approach technique, as mentioned here:

Basically not only will this give you a better control over the font’s glyph border, but it will also give out many other set of features such as outlines, shadow, bold, thin (when using gradients):

image
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