Support for letterSpacing possible?

[tleunen]

Support for letterSpacing possible?

[bluepichu]

I should have a bit of extra time tomorrow, so I'll try to take a look.

[ArronFerguson]

Thanks for looking into it!

[bluepichu]

Is this for a bitmap font? If not, it's not possible since text objects are backed by a canvas, which doesn't support character spacing. (See pixijs/pixijs#1748.)

The bahvior of character spacing at the edges between styles is also a bit interesting. For example, suppose wide has a large letterSpacing, and narrow has it set to 0. How should <narrow>abc<wide>def</wide>ghi</narrow> be rendered? abcd e fghi or abc d e f ghi?

[ArronFerguson]

Matthew,

It's for outline fonts, not bitmap. Yeah, I was thinking probably not. No worries, you can close it. Figured I'd check with the experts though.

:)

[bluepichu]

I'll leave this open, since letterSpacing probably should work for bitmap fonts at least.

I might also be able to make it work for non-bitmaps by simply drawing one character at a time - which would probably be a performance hit and might cause some fonts to do strange things, but would only kick in if letterSpacing is non-zero. The only way to find out is to try. 😄

Of course, we'd still need to decide on abcd e fghi vs. abc d e f ghi. Another possibility I just thought of is to have the letterSpacing be evenly divided on both sides of a character - which would give abc-d e f-ghi, where - is half the width of a space.

[bluepichu]

Never mind about bitmap fonts - I didn't realize that there was a separate class for those in Pixi. We'd need to add any support for bitmap fonts before we could think of adding this feature for them, and I currently don't see any need to unless there's a particular interest in bitmap fonts.

Anyway, I'll see if drawing one character at a time works for non-bitmaps.

[bluepichu]

Turns out it was surprisingly straightforward.

As for my earlier question, I went with the third option - abc-d e f-ghi.

Edit:

That has letterSpacing set to -1 for "multiline" and to 5 for "multistyle".

[bluepichu]

PR filed: #40.

[ArronFerguson]

OMG wow, that was fast! Thank you so much!

[tleunen]

@bluepichu What's the value of letterSpacing actually? What does represent a letterSpacing of 0 and a letter spacing of 5? Is it an offset in pixels?

[bluepichu]

Yes.