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Beginner Joined: 01 Jun 2006 Posts: 16

Is there a way to make a room label scalable?

That is, the font size increases when you zoom in, and decreases when you zoom out, so that the label has the same relative size to the coordinate system (room sizes etc.)

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 4:58 pm

No, zMapper doesn't support scaleable fonts, sorry. zMapper uses the Windows MetaFile graphics format, which is a vector based system for drawing shapes. Metafiles don't support scaleable fonts, so I wasn't able to put this into zMapper.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

Any way to support it in the future? I have always been plagued with labels for other zones that can not be positioned, scaled, or even just shifted a little so the text doesn't collide with a room. zMud and zMapper have both employed the same engine for this display, and I would love a way to not have to adjust mmy maps around the text and also not have to just give up on being able to read the text.

A second feature for consideration on the same general idea would be a way to group display of interzone link text into a single box, consider when I have 5 rooms all of which have exits leading to another zone, but they are close enough together that the texts overlay making all of them unreadable. I would like all of those links to be displayed with lines running to a communal box showing the text only once. Just something to think about after CMud is in public status Cool

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Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 1:17 am

Sorry, but probably not for a long time. Doing scaleable fonts that scale properly with the MetaFile stuff is a real pain. The font system just isn't designed for it. Also, you end up with text that *always* looks horrible since you end up with fractional point sizes. And you can't just round the font point size because then it doesn't really scale.

The problem is that normal Windows fonts just aren't designed to be rendered in the tiny point sizes that you'd end up with in the mapper. The only way to really make this work is to come up with a vectorized font and then scale it, but vector fonts are also very ugly (this is how CAD programs handle scaleable text, for example).

Maybe someone can post suggestions on how to handle this problem. It's the same issue with fonts in DirectX, which is why DirectX doesn't help with zMUD text scrolling. DirectX has very little support for fonts and also doesn't handle font scaling properly. Maybe Vista will have better scaleable fonts, but I'm not holding my breath.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

It seems that zMapper already has similar capability with the scalable bitmap background. Isn't there some way to place another layer over/on top of the metafile graphics? Maybe what I'm thinking about would be another completely different project. I just think there should be a way to eliminate all text from the mapper layer and move it and other fancy gizmos to an 'on-top, transparent overlay'.

Beginner Joined: 01 Jun 2006 Posts: 16

Okay, i'm not a windows API and GDI stuff expert, but..

It really doesn't sound that great a challenge to set the desired font size according to user's zoom level (and of course label style), then turn the label to a vector graphic (a metafile shape) that scales properly as do all the shapes in the mapper..

or maybe rasterize the font, so that it scales, but gets rasterized-ugly at high zoom levels (if the above solution doesn't work).