How to get 3D points from true type font?

[HanWu]

Does anyone know how to get the 3D points (contour of the font) from a true type font? I am currently doing a project that require to convert the true type font into a 3D polyline. Hope someone could show me some hints or any website to get the information regarding to this problem. Thanks.

[T101]

If you just want it for text rendering have a look at this.

http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons....asp?lesson=14

If not, you'll have to render the character to a monochrome bitmap (freetype can do that for you), do an edge detect (i.e. find the pixels that differ from their neighbours), then turn the edge pixels into vertices and extrude.
A lot of work, and you'll probably get more vertices than you actually need.

[EDIT] Or see if you can find the specifications on the truetype format, and then parse the definitions. After all, characters are defined as lines and arcs in TT.

[SeskaPeel]

Freetype handles everything you need for arcs and contour. Still you'll need to extrude from those points by yourself.
http://www.freetype.org

You can find an implementation of what you want to achieve here : http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/henryj/code/#FTGL

And I would not advise doing font rendering as shown in the NeHe example, that is full of bad practices, and completely texture space ineficient.

SeskaPeel

[HanWu]

Originally posted by SeskaPeel:
Freetype handles everything you need for arcs and contour. Still you'll need to extrude from those points by yourself.
http://www.freetype.org

You can find an implementation of what you want to achieve here : http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/henryj/code/#FTGL

And I would not advise doing font rendering as shown in the NeHe example, that is full of bad practices, and completely texture space ineficient.

SeskaPeel

I agree with you, the font rendering method from the NeHe example is very slow when dealing with a big number of string. Using FreeType is a good idea, but the problem is I develop my project with C# using Tao framework. I don't know how to include the .lib (FreeType) file from visual c++ to C#. Do you have any idea how to do it? Thanks.