Wiggling texture mapped fonts

[Sarah_Clough]

I’m trying to draw some text that wiggles (statically) on the screen. i.e. I’ve got a wiggly line, and I want my text to appear along it. A bit like if I’m drawing a sphere, and want to write ‘sphere’ curling round the outside of it, or writing road names on a map. Does anyone know how I do this?

I’ve got a texture mapped font working, using brad fish’s glfont (http://students.cs.byu.edu/~bfish/glfont.php)

I’ve tried changing the vertex coordinates so that instead of a regular oblong, the oblong kinks a little in the middle, and where it kinds (half way along) I use change the texture coordinate to the half way point of the texture. However, the text distorts (not in the right directions) and becomes unreadable.

Any ideas why this doesn’t work, or a different method I could use?

Thanks.

[Brolingstanz]

Well, for each character in the wiggling text, I’d take a point on the wiggly line and the point’s tangent and normal vector and make a frame for the glyph’s rectangle, then wiggle along the wiggly line, repeating the process, until I ran out of wiggle or text.

[Sarah_Clough]

Thanks.
Would you still use texture mapped fonts, or outline fonts?

[Brolingstanz]

i’d use texture mapped fonts

[Sarah_Clough]

I’ve written a nice little algorithm for this now!