61.1 Overview

Hollywood's text library contains functions that deal with font management, text measurement, text drawing, as well as text transformation. You can open fonts using the commands SetFont(), OpenFont(), or @FONT. One important thing to know is that Hollywood supports two different text renderers:

1. Inbuilt text renderer: This is the recommended renderer, although it isn't the default renderer due to historical reasons. The inbuilt renderer operates completely independent of the host operating system's text renderer and thus will guarantee that text looks exactly the same on every platform. The pixels drawn by functions such as Print() and TextOut() will be exactly the same on every platform if you use the inbuilt text renderer. You can access the inbuilt text renderer by setting the Engine tag of the SetFont(), OpenFont(), or @FONT commands to #FONTENGINE_INBUILT.

2. Native text renderer: This will use the host operating system's text renderer. Due to historical reasons, this is also the default renderer but it isn't recommended to use it because text drawn using this renderer will look slightly different on each platform. If this is no problem for you, you can just go ahead and use it but if you aim to achieve an identical look on every platform, you should use the inbuilt text renderer instead.

The inbuilt text renderer can also open *.ttf fonts directly, so you don't even have to install fonts in order to use them with the inbuilt text renderer. You could just use code like this:

OpenFont(1, "c:/Windows/Fonts/Arial.ttf", 36, {Engine = #FONTENGINE_ INBUILT})

See Font specification for details.

See Working with fonts for details.