How to get the length of a bitmap text?

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

Hi all,

maybe anyone already figured that out or has an idea:

If I use a Bitmap font of a true type text I get letters with variable length:


I would like to know if there is a way to get the length of the complete object from beginning of the first letter to the end of the last letter.
a simple fixedLength * len(string) would’t do it as there is no fixed length.

Thanks very much

2

I’m not sure, but here’s a basic idea - keep a dictionary of how wide each letter is. For example, all letters but i, j, l, and f are pretty much the same size, so you probably can step through the string to determine the total length according to the dictionary.

3

The problem is, where to get the size data from :D?
I’m pretty sure it is in the bitmap. But there is no access. The idea is, to get it running with any font texture :S.

4

If you use the BLF module[1], not only do you get anti-aliased true type fonts, but you can also get the size of a given string with blf. dimensions(fontid, “string”), which will return the height and width the given string will have with the given fontid. Unfortunately, blf can be a little weird to use in the BGE (raw OpenGL calls need to be used to line up matrices). I have a blf demo somewhere on these boards if you want to hunt them down. If you’re doing GUIs, I’d take a look at BGUI [2]. It makes GUIs in the BGE a lot easier. The downside to BGUI is that it’s still new and thus the API can be unstable (subject to change).

[1] http://www.blender.org/documentation/250PythonDoc/blf.html
[2] http://stokes.dyndns.org/redmine/projects/bgui/wiki

5

I saw the BGUI. It is fine

but that is not the plan I have right now. I still go with 2.49 and try with the available resources.
I just discovered that bitmap font characters can be wider than the single plane (e.g. character ‘w’) while ‘i’ is quite short. I might need to go with Joemans16’s idea of storing a width estimation dictionary.

6

The actual width of each character is stored in that row of dots along the top of the font- but unfortunately I’ve found absolutely no documentation as to how to translate it.