Re: [Freetype] Halo(?) font/effect

[Peter Montgomery]

Ian,

> The effect (Called a 'halo font' by the end user - Not sure if that is the
correct
> term or not) results in a ring (typically white) of a pixel or two being
drawn
> all the way around each character, almost as if the character was drawn on
top
> of a larger version of itself.
<SNIP>
> So, I'm wondering if FreeType has any support for this feature, or if
anyone
> has suggestions about how to achieve this?  The best approach I've found
so far
> is to extract the curves of each character, draw them as (white) lines
with a
> thick lineweight, then proceed to draw the (black) character on top as per
usual.

You could also come at this from an image processing perspective.  Once you
have a bitmap of your string, perform a dilation of the image and then merge
that with the bitmap from Freetype.  I did a google search on the following
terms:

image dilation code

Here's a couple of hits that looked interesting:

This one has some source code:
http://www.theimagingsource.com/prod/soft/adoculos/adoculos_textbook_sc_sourcecode.htm

This one shows some images of dilation, erosion, etc:
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/docs/menus/process.html


This is an open source image processing library that looked interesting and
contained various morphological functions such as dilation:
http://www.cs.rug.nl/~cosmin/tip/

    Thanks,
    PeterM