i'm making myself a little toolkit on top of pygame to make simple games relatively quickly. today's unnecessary and possibly overcomplicated feature: hand-rolled VWF text using bitmap fonts
typesetting pixel fonts isn't my forte but the code itself works exactly the way i envisioned
(you don't actually need to send me five dollars)
@typhlosion VWF text is not too bad
But VWF automatic word wrapping, that's a pain
@Triplefox im not even gonna try to do automatic word wrap, at least not at the moment. that, at least, i can recognize as overkill for this project at this time
i don't foresee it being tooooo much of a problem, though. since i'm not doing dynamic kerning or anything, in theory it'd just be a bunch of careful addition with some rules about where splits can happen
@typhlosion also there is this incredibly simple one Wikipedia describes which could be applied to variable width easily:
A primitive line-breaking feature was used in 1955 in a "page printer control unit" developed by Western Union. This system used relays rather than programmable digital computers, and therefore needed a simple algorithm that could be implemented without data buffers. In the Western Union system, each line was broken at the first space character to appear after the 58th character, or at the 70th character if no space character was found.
@Triplefox yeah my envisioning was to do that but only precalculate for one word at a time (i.e. at the moments when you'd want to decide whether to linebreak or not anyway)
@typhlosion there are a lot of additional features that can lead to precomputing. Like, I think I had one where there were specific words that the player could change with a cursor, and this made the paragraph move around jarringly when the word changes.
But yeah, rendering can get as complex as you want, especially with stuff like text. I am now making a system that is monospace linewrapped instead.
@Triplefox i dont think im gonna use this for much outside of like, dialog boxes and certain ui elements, so i dont think i need to worry too much about fanciness
@typhlosion It's one where it's juuust complicated enough that you get bit by weird off-by-ones and desynchronization between when the word breaks and when the line breaks. I believe the best way right now for the basic greedy algorithm is:
1. Precompute word sizes
2. Now render one word at a time, checking for the end of line.
3. If word is wider than width of line, render one character at a time to line-wrap it.
4. If word is thinner than width of line but wider than remaining space, linebreak and continue.