This directory contains font files for use with VRweb 1.3.
Part of the current distribution are the following two fonts:
wfserf.wrl and
wfsans.wrl
~/.vrweb/fonts unless
you have stated a different directory with Xattribute
fontDir.
We hope to be able to distribute more fonts in future releases (currently Sanserif is also used to approximate Typewriter). The font format is quite simple, so you may wish to experiment on converting fonts from other sources into VRweb's font format.
The following chapters handle file name conventions, describe the file format, and discuss potential font sources.
None of these topics will be of interest for you, if you are happy browsing VRML worlds with the fonts provided.
Font files loaded by VRweb follow this naming scheme:
where
The
The files of the distribution were given a prefix of
The files are in standard VRML 1.0 format. To let VRweb find the
character glyphs they should have the following structure:
Font characters should be in the xy-plane (x to the right, y up,
z==0). The height of the font should be chosen such that multiple
lines 10 units vertically away from each other look properly
spaced. The base line of the font is at y==0. Horicontal spacing
refers to x==0 and the right border of each character, thus negative x
values can be used to let characters jut out over the space to the
previous one (e.g. 'j').
Public sources for stroke/polygonal fonts are quite rare. We used the
Hershey fonts (also used in the Harmony 3D Information Landscape) for
the distribution, another alternative would be the PEX fonts of the
X11R6 distribution (also used by GLUT).
We have also written a script converting Inventor font data to VRML
(only runs on SGIs). Due to potential legal and definitive performance
issues the script is not distributed. Solid fonts are slower to render
(under OpenGL you can use Line-Antialiasing for nice font outlooks).
If you know about other suitable font sources, please inform us by mail.
Last updated: Michael Pichler, 13 Sep 1996.
Font file names
[base][family][style].[suffix]
[base] can be chosen arbitrarily (Xattribute
fontFileBase). [family] is one of
serf (Serif/Roman), sans
(Sanserif/Helvetica) or type (Typewriter/Courier) and is
selected according to family of the FontStyle.
[style] part of the filename can be empty (normal
font), b (bold), i (italic) or
bi (bold italic). Missing italic fonts are substituted by
slanting normal fonts, bold fonts are approximated by increasing the
line width. [suffix] must be wrl for VRweb
1.3, future versions may read gzipped fonts too.
wf
(for wireframe fonts).
File format
#VRML V1.0 ascii
Separator {
ShapeHints { creaseAngle 0.0 }
DEF chr0x21 Separator { ... }
DEF chr0x41 Separator { ... }
...
}
Characters are labeled with their hexadecimal ASCII code (0x21 is
'!', 0x41 is 'A'), and need not be in any particular
order. creaseAngle 0.0 turns off autosmoothing for flat fonts. Inside
the character definitions, other nodes than Coordinate3,
IndexedFaceSet and IndexedLineSet should not
be used to avoid side effects with the scene graph.
Font Sources