Use a custom and uniform font

[baconpaul]

The design folks would love to use the open font @cyanit @itsmedavep
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lato

To use it reliably in draws we would want to include it in the resources so we can load it in app without requiring it installed on the underlying system. That’s platform dependent.

It also may or may be something we get done. But lets put an issue in place since it would make painted labels more consistent with vector graphics and stuff if we use a scalable vector thingy.

On windows and linux I haven’t googled yet. On Mac I found this:

ATSApplicationFontsPath (String - macOS) identifies the location of a font file or directory of fonts in the bundle’s Resources directory. If present, macOS activates the fonts at the specified path for use by the bundled app. The fonts are activated only for the bundled app and not for the system as a whole. The path itself should be specified as a relative directory of the bundle’s Resources directory. For example, if a directory of fonts was at the path /Applications/MyApp.app/Contents/Resources/Stuff/MyFonts/, you should specify the string Stuff/MyFonts/ for the value of this key.

[jarkkojs]

Just a question (haven't studied sources) but how does the text rendering work at the moment? VSTGUI stuff uses its own path and stuff on screen other one?

[jarkkojs]

I'd say that for on-screen stuff the font would best to be fixed-width because that leaves a lot of choices for optimizations (i.e. render them as bitmaps and scale instead of wasting cpu on rendering vectors). For menus and such you can use vectors because they are not constantly updated.

I.e. load a fixed-width vector font and pre-calculate bitmaps of it on several sizes.

Lato might be good for menus and high-level UI components but it is not a good choice for on-screen stuff just because it is not a fixed-width font. You loose a lot of optimization angles by using it. You really want to optimize the constantly updating on-screen stuff to the extreme. This is especially important if we ever want scale Surge down to iOS or Android.

[kurasu]

Lato is perfect, its very pretty and and renders digits at constant size so its very well suited to numerical diplays.

@jsakkine
I'd assume VSTGUI just uses the platform font rendering, nothing custom. We don't want a fixed-size font for stylistic reasons, and any optimizations needed can be done at a string-level instead of character level. But since we're hardly doing any text rendering at real-time intervals anyway (apart form the text-popup on mouse-drag) I don't see how this sholud ever be an issue.

[baconpaul]

yeah I think there's really no cpu benefit from a fixed width font nowadays and the UI is all double buffered properly anyway.

@kurasu yup the vstgui uses the installed platform font tools in the PlatformFont class underneath CFont it seems. I took a quick tour after I opened this issue. Right now the 3 fonts we use in surge seem to be Lucida Grande (mac), MS Sans Serif and Arial (windows); and the "system small font" about screen.

But this issue is really about "how do we include a ttf file with our bundle which is loadable".

[jarkkojs]

OK, cool. Where is the text/number rendering code located for on-screen display?

[baconpaul]

It’s all in the vstgui lib. Look in src for setFont and you will find the draw command. Pull from there

The font object will load any ttf file which is in your path. How do you include it in the bundle and put it in the path?

[jarkkojs]

Thanks. Will look into this at some point.

[baconpaul]

Cool. Happy to hop on slack sometime to tell you what I’ve learned about vstgui so far if that’s of interest

[baconpaul]

Well just a bit of experimenting tells me ATSAPplicationFont doesn't work for .component bundles.

[baconpaul]

Just dropping this here for my next attempt

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21788100/ctfontmanagerregistergraphicsfont-does-not-register-the-family-name

[baconpaul]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/wingdi/nf-wingdi-addfontmemresourceex for my windows attempt too

[baconpaul]

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coretext/1499468-ctfontmanagerregisterfontsforurl?language=objc sorry to spam this issue with my notes but I keep getting 5 minute windows to look and don't want to forget

[baconpaul]

I don't have Lato installed on my mac, but here's a surge running with lato that it loads from the bundle.

Windows next.

[baconpaul]

Sigh OK so this is easy to make work on mac but harder on windows. Let me put my notes here

VSTGUI uses direct2d api for drawing. That means the platform font is a direct2d font created with the direct2dfactor->CreateTExtFormat method. This happens in vstgui/lib/platform/win32/direct2d/d2dfont.cpp

Now unfortunately vstgui sets the font factory to "NULL" which means use the system factory, and there's no way through the vstgui API to tell it otherwise. So I'm down in direct2d code trying to figure it out rather than the easy AddResourceFontEx thing above.

May clean up and PR mac on its own just to get us rolling. Still debating.

[baconpaul]

OK decided to move us forward with MacOS only. I think Linux may actually be the more important next choice to be honest, since the fonts there are more haphazardly chosen and some users had crashes. Will peek at that code for a few minutes but then I'm mostly offline for the weekend.

[baconpaul]

So with Windows and Linux it won't be quite as easy, mostly because the VSTGUI API is a bit in our way. Basically we need to be able to reset the PlatformFont on a CFont object. The PlatformFont for linux just has a cairo_font thingy inside which is easy to create from a binary but we have to thread it through.

So we have a couple of options

1: We can modify vstgui a bunch to allow us to weave stuff through. I don't recommend this
2: We can make local subclasses of CFontDesc which allow us to reset the platform font, and then of the IPlatformFont for each of linux and windows.

Basically where CFontDesc::getPlatformFont does if(platformFont==null) platformFont=IPlatformFont::create we want to have set the platformFont before then.

on linux we want to set it to a subclass of platform/linux/cairofont.cpp's Cairo::Font which has the binary load

on windows we want to set it to a subclass of platform/win32/direct2d/d2dfont.cpp's D2DFont which basically has the nasty CreateTExtFormat hack you can google

And then force the subclass back up in probably using the CFontDesc copy constructor

Something like that lets us add our API without having to gut vstgui

Not easy. But not impossible. But not tonight.