[PD] unicode symbols and Pd

[Christof Ressi]

It only works for GEM because it is actually responsible for drawing 
text onto the screen (probably using the freetype library, but haven't 
checked). The Pd core, on the other hand, doesn't do anything like that, 
it just sends commands to the GUI.

However, you can certainly ask Tcl/Tk to draw text using a certain font. 
In fact, the IEM GUI objects do exactly this.

The only remaining problem is that you want to use local fonts instead 
of asking the user to install them. Actually, we already have the 
pdfontloader Tcl extension (https://github.com/pure-data/pdfontloader) 
to load the bundled Deja Vu Sans Mono font. However, it's specific to 
Windows (AddFontResourceExW) and you would need to port it to other 
systems. I'm not sure if it's even possible on macOS and Linux, you 
would have to do some research. But if it works, you could just call 
|pdfontloader::load $path |in your external with sys_vgui(). However, 
the extension has to compiled against the correct Tk version, so ideally 
it would be shipped with Pd. You could open a feature request.

Christof

On 15.02.2021 04:32, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> Em seg., 18 de jan. de 2021 às 17:45, IOhannes m zmölnig 
> <zmoelnig at iem.at <mailto:zmoelnig at iem.at>> escreveu:
>
>     there are of course exceptions to this: eg Gem handles the fonts
>     on its own (using a library; I'm not crazy enough attempting to
>     handle fonts myself).
>
>
> Wow, This is huge for me. And I missed what this meant when I first 
> read it (don't read emails on summer vacation).
>
> So we can do this on the external level. I see it might be tricky and 
> perhaps you can elaborate on the challenges please. It's just that 
> once I was asking if we could do that for external (thinking about 
> cyclone/comment then) and I got the idea that telling externals where 
> to look for fonts is not possible, but I see now Gem allows us to do that!
>
> This would really be great for something like this where you can ship 
> a "music symbol" font and use an external like cyclone/comment to 
> display cool symbolic musical thingies!
>
> I'll check on it and see if I can make any of it.
>
> Cheers
>
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