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I couldn't think of a good title for this topic but here is my problem. I'm trying to make a font that's a bit different from what's out there. I'm going to be making all the letters individually and store each in a sub. A,B,C,D and so forth. I don't remember if subs are case sensitive. If so than little A would be AA or something.

I want to make a function that will take in a string, and then break it down in order to get a sentence. What would that function look like? Or do you need more information?

Well this font is scalable, and works with lines, and curves instead of pictures. So the function would need to look something like this:

functionName "string blah blah blah", [x-coordinate],[y-coordinate], [scale],[color]

FUNCTION and SUB statements aren't case sensitive. But strings (i.e., text *data*) that you pass to or from them are. However, if I'm even close to understanding why you want to do, it appears that you're going about it the hard way. Why not just store your font patterns in an array. If you want to use the same size font as is standard for whatever video mode you're using, you can modify the fonts normally used by your video system. (It's particularly easy in a graphics video mode.)

Take a look at how I did it in HAR 13h++ (my GFX library, Pure-QB).
http://www.qbfm.cjb.net. Look at HARinstallBFont, HARinstallSFont, HARprintt, HARprint and HARsetFontTexture. Those are the routines for font-handling.

You better make just one sub which reads the letters and draws accordingly:

Nathan your a genious. Simplest answers are always the best. THat was exactly what I was looking for.

um, though you seem set, you could always just make a string array with a draw statement for each ascii value.

Here is what I got for my code.


While that creates a very flexible font it still looks pretty bad. Is there any way I can apply an anti-aliasing effect. To make it look thicker or something.

And what's this I hear about the DRAW command. Are you saying I can use it to Draw letters?

Anti alias is tricky, but perfectly done. The problem is that:

1. You've to have a gray palette or something like 332 if you want the background taking part of your antialias if you're in 8 bits.
2. Or maybe you need a hicolour/truecolour mode
3. Or you can plain-antialias always to the same colour (for example black), in that case you'd need a gradient palette.

Once you've solved that, just look for a SUB which draws antialiased lines, and replace your LINE statemets for SUB calls.

Here you have code and explanations of how to build an antialiased line. It is not in QB, but this kinda pascal-pseudocode-like thing is easy to translate to QB: http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/g...wuline.htm

remember logo? that little turtle you moved around to make images? or better yet, etch-a-sketch. draw works something like that.

http://qbasicnews.com/qboho/qckdraw.shtml

as for what you seem to want, though, it's vector fonts, like windows uses. it works (i think, not sure) by using a scan fill on a vector image. basically run down an image pixel by pixel, if it crosses a border change from 'do not draw' to 'draw'. to anti-alias, if it's on a border, draw the percentage of the pixel that is covered by the line using simple algebra. obviously, qb is not well suited for such a task, and even ugl's vector fonts are pretty slow. but in low resolutions, i can't see why you'd want to, just use a bitmap font.

Well, I did it myself... I took the code I gave you and made this working QB version. This takes the third assumption (everything antialiases to black):


Hope you like this