CODEWITHSUNDEEP
fontslibgdxviewportscaling
VanesBee
VanesBee

Reputation: 616

Font and Viewport libgdx

I'm currently struggling a lot with FreeTypeFontGenerator from libgdx.

Here is my code : 

public class FontTestScreen extends ScreenAdapter {
    private static final float WORLD_HEIGHT = 100;
    private static final int FONT_SIZE = (int) (WORLD_HEIGHT/10);

    private Viewport viewport;
    private SpriteBatch batch;
    private FreeTypeFontGenerator fontGenerator;
    private BitmapFont font;

    public FontTestScreen() {
        fontGenerator = new FreeTypeFontGenerator(Gdx.files.internal("calibri.ttf"));
        batch = new SpriteBatch();
        /* Setting the viewport */
        viewport = new ExtendViewport(0, WORLD_HEIGHT);
        /* BitmapFont */
        FreeTypeFontGenerator.FreeTypeFontParameter parameter = new FreeTypeFontGenerator.FreeTypeFontParameter();
        parameter.size = FONT_SIZE;
        parameter.color = Color.BLACK;
        font = fontGenerator.generateFont(parameter);
    }

    @Override
    public void resize(int width, int height) {
        viewport.update(width, height, true);
        batch.setProjectionMatrix(viewport.getCamera().combined);
    }

    @Override
    public void render(float delta) {
        Gdx.gl.glClearColor(1, 1, 1, 1);
        Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
        batch.begin();
        font.draw(batch, "Hello", WORLD_HEIGHT/2, WORLD_HEIGHT/2);
        batch.end();
    }

}

My problem is the following : If I correctly understood the viewport philosophy I should get rid of the notion of pixel. If my world has the meter for unit, well, instead of thinking with pixel I should use a viewport to set my world coordinates. In my example my world would be 100 meters high. I want to print a text whose size will be 10 meters. The problem is that the text is really pixelated and unreadable. If I change my world_height to 1000 instead of 10 and try to print my text with a size of 100 instead of 10 the text is not pixelated anymore. This behaviour doesn't happen with textures ! Why do I have to struggle with that when only the ratio should be of importance ?

The more logical answer I found is that i'm doing it wrong. So please help me understanding the correct way of dealing with fonts.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1166

Answers (1)

Tenfour04
Tenfour04

Reputation: 93591

Your viewport is in meters (or whatever) units. But FreeTypeFontGenerator uses pixels, because it's drawing pixels into a bitmap to create your font. So use the number of pixels tall you want your font to be.

In your case, since you want the font to be 1/10 the height of the screen:

private static final float FONT_SCREEN_HEIGHT_FRACTION = 1/10f;

//...
parameter.size = (int)(FONT_SCREEN_HEIGHT_FRACTION * Gdx.graphics.getHeight());

Then scale the resulting font so it will be in your world units instead of pixel units:

font = fontGenerator.generateFont(parameter);
font.getData().setScale(WORLD_HEIGHT / Gdx.graphics.getHeight());

Upvotes: 3

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