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[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Here is just something I find interesting I wanted to make a note of. I was wondering if the TrueType font format had any kind of exotic support for a color palette or something like that for its fonts. Just out of curiosity because I doubted Windows would have acted on the information if available.

Web searches don't turn up much, maybe "Multi-color Font" is the best keywords to use. Here (http://www.istartedsomething.com/20130628/microsoft-adds-multi-color-fonts-in-windows-8-1-proposes-opentype-standard/) is a top scoring page that suggests this is something coming to Windows (along with spelling checking in Windows 8)

This (and spelling checking) are both two very interesting additions to Windows. I was curious myself why this wasn't a thing, because it seems like it would be so obviously useful, especially because font rendering is the only place desktop operating systems tend to provide native support for scalable (aka. vector) graphics.


I think games of the 21st century need to get far away from bitmaps for fonts and other UI elements, especially if they are for PCs which can come in many different resolution modes. I think SOM's menus would actually be much improved if the frames were built out of fonts for instance, that and perhaps 3D models (with fonts at least for the lettering elements)


Black and white (or tinted) would work fine, but fonts with colours would make things more interesting naturally.


P.S. Random thought. I had thought for a long time that the way SOM offers resolutions to play at (clearly based on originally being a fullscreen only affair) is antiquated and should be revised on a new system screen ASAP. But looking at videos of the PlayStation games (edited: and playing one a little bit a few days ago) and other "indie" games it occurred to me that that old blocky look that comes from low resolution may actually be useful for emulating the style of older games, so I'm inclined to keep things the way they are. Or at the very least not just have the resolution set to the size of the window hosting the game.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]