| Abstract: | Placing text on the graphics screen in any size any angle is an important function of a graphics program. Some microcomputers, however, will not print characters on the graphics screen, and others have very limited ability, such as printing only in 40-character or 80-character mode. Characters are needed for dimensions and notes on the drawing as well as for prompts and messages. Alternate fonts, rotation of the text, and different sizes of text are needed for many applications, not to mention text that is scaled up and down as the user zooms in or out to magnify or reduce the size of the image. This article examines available techniques and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each. A method is presented for producing stroke generated text by designing each character as a matrix of dots on a standard grid and storing the coordinates of the dots as endpoints of vectors to be used to draw the character. The standard grid is assumed to have its origin in the lower left corner and each coordinate is defined relative to that origin. |
