Meeting XII — Texts and Fonts

Cheat sheets for exams

• A long one from the University of Birmingham
• A one page sheet from Sparkfun
• The Google search

Continuing…

Continuing on Tuesday’s class.

Stuff worth reading

• Project 7: Playing with Text from the The SparkFun Guide to Processing
• Typography by Casey Reas and Ben Fry

To do

We will finish up Strings and Drawing Text by David Shiffman.

References for fonts

• textSize()
  Sets the font size. There is a lot more about this…
• PFont
  Font class for Proceesing.
• Pfont.list()
  This is a Java class method for listing available fonts.
• createFont()
  Converts vector fonts (.ttf or .otf) into a size-specific .vlw font where each letter has a texture
  When posting a sketch on the web, you should include the .ttf or .otf file in the sketch data directory.
• loadFont()
  Loads a .vlw file from the sketch data directory.
  Use Processing’s Create Font… tool to create and install the .vlw in your sketch data directory.
• textFont()
  Sets the current font.

References about writing text

• text()
  Writes words on the screen.
• textWidth()
  Width of text when displayed in current font and size.
• textAscent()
  Ascent (above the baseline) of current font.
• textDescent()
  Descent (below the baseline) of current font.

Look at Monica’s Site tutorial on Drawing Styled Text for a geeky Java-based discussion of these terms.