CODEWITHSUNDEEP
direct3d11
Rafael Ferreira
Rafael Ferreira

Reputation: 91

How can I render text using font files on Direct3D 11?

I've read many questions about this, but they don't satisfy what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to use a TTF file for the text's font on my application, I thought of using Direct Draw, but the tutorial from Microsoft website only explains how to use it with Direct2D. How am I supposed to load data from this file and render text for my Direct3D application using this file's font? I've also read about the AddFontResourceExA() function, but I didn't find any content of how I could use this. I'm really lost here, so any help is appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1793

Answers (1)

Chuck Walbourn
Chuck Walbourn

Reputation: 41057

There are basically two approaches for rendering text on a Direct3D 11 Render Target / Texture.

  1. Rendering using a 'sprite sheet'. Here you capture the font at a particular resolution and generate a texture from it. Then you use the texture to render the glyphs as textured triangles. This is very fast and inexpensive to render, but does not scale to arbitrary resolutions (you can capture the 'sprite sheet' at multiple point sizes to get some scaling) and does not work well with "CKJ" languages due to the large size of the fonts. For an example of this, see SpriteFont in the DirectX Tool Kit. This is what legacy D3DX9/D3DX10 did as well.

  2. Rendering using vector fonts directly. Here you have some kind of library that generates triangles 'on-the-fly' from the "TrueType" vector font data. This is what Direct2D+DirectWrite is designed to do. You can use interop with Direct3D 11 surfaces, but essentially you are using DirectWrite -> Direct2D -> shared texture. Then you draw the shared texture with Direct3D as a 'sprite'. This is more complicated to setup, but results in arbitrary resolutions scaling, support for large character set fonts, and handles complex writing systems.

Upvotes: 4

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