I want to create a main page for a program I'm trying to write and basically, I want to print the title at the center with a large font and menu and the rest after that. What I'm looking for is any character set in ncursesw or just anything which will help me draw large characters for title more precisely
For this (in ncurses), I tried A_REVERSE attribute and printed the respective places white, something like this
Large text
But other letters like z, g and t are hard to draw and they don't look good either.
Related
I'm using Microsoft's Cascadia Code font and drawing text with DirectWrite using ID2D1RenderTarget::DrawTextLayout, with individual glyphs colored using IDWriteTextLayout::SetDrawingEffect(CreateSolidColorBrush(...)).
Cascadia Code has a ligature for "greater than or equal to" (=>) that draws as a single arrow glyph. If I have half of the glyph selected, using HitTestTextRange to paint the background highlights the correct area, but setting the selected character's drawingEffect to a different color than the unselected side doesn't work. The entire glyph is painted using the drawing effect from the second character, resulting on one side drawing as white-on-white or black-on-blue. GetClusterMetrics returns two separate clusters for it. Conversely, if I have some Arabic text like ممم, which presumably uses a substituted font, it draws as a ligature, but the individual characters within it will draw as different colors.
Is implementing IDWriteTextRenderer the best way to handle this situation or is there an easier one?
Also, comparing Cascadia Code's supported ligatures in Notepad or Visual Studio Code against my app shows that most ligatures are drawn like they should be, but a handful of them aren't. -~ (minus tilde) draws as a single symbol in Notepad, VS Code, my app, and the Windows SDK's PadWrite sample app, but /\ only draws as an inverted V in the first two. The "infinite arrows" like >==>==> are similarly broken up. Is there a setting I need to use to enable all of them?
I have a variable-width container (screen width) and fixed left and right margins. Remaining area gives me a constraint for maximum text width, where I'm placing text of variable content (multiple languages). I want text to fit into that width without truncation, wrapping if needed. Text is relatively short - it may fit into single line, likely to fit into 2 lines and will fit into 3 lines for sure.
I want to avoid cases like (2) - where text wraps into long and a short line. It does not look nice. Instead I would like it to wrap more evenly, like in case (3).
For the demo purposes I've hardcoded hand-picked margins, but I want solution to work automatically for any text content and any container width.
Is it achievable using built-in Flutter widgets, or I need to implement something custom, similar to https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/auto_size_text?
I'm trying to create a script for Linux that will detect where the text cursor is. This should be done in maximum 1 second. In order to implement this, the best solution seems to be to programmatically add some text via xdotool, take a screenshot via some other utility, try to figure out the position of that text, and then remove the text we've inserted using xdotool again.
I tried inserting a random string (like <-- CURSOR HERE). Using Tesseract 4 it takes about 20 seconds to find the position of the string, although it's very precise in terms of pixel coordinates. I was not able to use whitelisting (in version 4 of Tesseract) to narrow result to specific letters or digits only, which I assume would speed up processing.
I don't know what font the user will be using, but every font has dashes and slashes, so I could create some sort of shape (for instance, |/\|/\|/\|/\|), and use some library to detect that shape. What would be a good choice?
I don't care about what's on the rest of the screen: it could be more text, images, etc. I only need o know where my random string is (<-- CURSOR HERE, |/\|/\|/\|/\|, or can you think of anything else), and get its X/Y position in pixels.
I would like to generate some diagram style graphics using SVG and use text in the diagrams. My problem is, how to know the size of the text in advance to be able to adjust the rest of the layout accordingly. To make this explicit: I'm not talking about SVG in a browser. I would like to work with fixed units and generate PDF for printing for example. So if I use a 12pt font, it should also be printed as 12pt font.
To have a more concrete example: Lets assume I have the three strings "bla", "blablub" and "blubblablub". I would like to print them in a given 12pt font, determine the string size and enclosing boxes and draw the biggest sized box around all of them. The idea is to have equally sized boxed around all, based on the longest text.
Could somebody give me a hint how to do that or why it is not possible? Searching for this topic, I only get some JavaScript tricks in the browser, which usually involves rendering the text and then re-rendering everything again.
Using HitTestTextPosition style API from IDWriteTextLayout I did not managed to handle properly text positions inside "ti", "ffi" or other ligatures with fonts like Calibri. It always returns position after or before ligature not inside like t|i or f|f|i.
What is the recommended way to do a caret movement inside ligatures with DirectWrite API?
There... is no "inside" position if you have GSUB replacements turned on?
Opentype GSUB ligatures are single glyph replacements for codepoint sequences, rather than being "several glyphs, smushed together". They are literally distinct, single glyphs, with single bounding boxes, and a single left and right side bearing for cursor placement/alignment. If you have the text A + E and the font has a ligature replacement that turns it into Ӕ then with ligatures enabled there really are only two cursor positions in that code sequence: |Ӕ and Ӕ|. You can't place the cursor "in the middle", because there is no "middle"; it's a single, atomic, indivisible element.
The same goes for f. ligatures like ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, or ſt: these are single glyphs once shaped with GSUB turned on. This is in fact what's supposed to happen: having GSUB ligatures enabled means you expressly want text to be presented—for all intents and purposes—as having atomic glyphs for many-to-one substitutions, like turning the full phrase "صلى الله عليه وعلى آله وسلم", as well as variations of that, into the single glyph ﷺ.
If you want to work with the base codepoint sequences (so that if you have a text with f + f + i it doesn't turn that into ffi) you will need to load the font with the liga OpenType feature disabled.
The text editors I know of use the simple hack of (1) dividing the width of the glyph cluster by the number of code points within the cluster (excluding any zero width combining marks), rather than use the GDEF caret positioning information. This includes even Word, which you can tell if you look closely enough below. It's not precise, but since it's simple and close enough at ordinary reading sizes, it's what many do:
(2) I've heard that some may (but don't know which) also use the original glyph advances of the unshaped characters (pre-ligation) and scale them proportionally to the ligature cluster width.
(3) Some text editors may use the GDEF table, but I never knew of any for sure (possibly Adobe In-Design?).
The most challenging aspect of using methods 2 or 3 with IDWriteTextLayout is that accessing the corresponding IDWriteFontFace in that run requires quite the indirection because the specific IDWriteFontFace used (after resolving font family name+WWS+variable font axes) is stored in the layout but not publicly accessible via any "getter" API. The only way you can extract them is by "drawing" the glyph runs via IDWriteTextLayout::Draw into a user-defined IDWriteTextRenderer interface to record all the DWRITE_GLYPH_RUN::fontFace's. Then you could call IDWriteFontFace::GetDesignGlyphAdvances on the code points or IDWriteFontFace::TryGetFontTable to read the OpenType GDEF table (which is complex to read). It's a lot of work, and that's because...
The official PadWrite example has the same issue
IDWriteTextLayout was designed for displaying text rather than editing it. It has some functionality for hit-testing which is useful if you want to display an underlined link in a paragraph and test for it being clicked (in which case the ligature would be whole anyway within a word), or if you want to draw some decorations around some text, but it wasn't really intended for the full editing experience, which includes caret navigation. It was always intended that actual text editing engines (e.g. those used in Word, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, ...) would call the lower level API's, which they do.
The PadWrite sample I wrote is a little misleading because although it supports basic editing, that was just so you can play around with the formatting and see how things worked. It had a long way to go before it could really be an interactive editor. For one (the big one), it completely recreated the IDWriteTextLayout each edit, which is why the sample only presented a few paragraphs of text, because a full editor with several pages of text would want to incrementally update the text. I don't work on that team anymore, but I've thought of creating a DWrite helper library on GitHub to fill in some hindsight gaps, and if I ever did, I'd probably just ... use method 1 :b.