Text/GFX rendering. Which lib ?

[Mathieu Chappuis]

Dears,

I'm designing a tool for a non profit organisation (housing aged
people). Purpose is displaying informations for an internal TV
channel, like airport arrivals or city bus display (crt/lcd) with
wheather (text), quote of the day. Or for europeans People a TELETEXT
/ VIDEOTEXT a bit more pretty.

Of course licence with fall into GPL or wtfpl, depend of my coding
proud. And of course that will written in Ruby.

Users (publishers) wont spend time to use a tool such Powerpoint for
designing pages or animations, too rich and too "I've missed the xyz
setting check box and my slides are messy!"

The goal is to describe the slides/animations pages with a syntax near
textile with special class extensions, convert to xhtml (easy) , parse
the xhtlm and do a graphic render. I've now a pre-working render
engine able to display using ANSI like. (old BBS time ). Source
Textile syntax is a bit violated to define the "pages" units but
that's done before, I don't patch Redcloth anyway.

The big dollars question is : what library use for such gfx rendering ?

I've tried ruby-opengl, rubygame, rubysdl, rudl. Theses libs are
working great here (Debian Etch) but a good font rendering seem to be
hard (I fail to have a working ftgl install). And some dependencies
like boost.org are enormous, far in size and features of my needs.

Because my app will mostly display text with simples bitmaps and
trivial animations or sprites or bitmaps moves, I feel using such libs
is too complex and hard to port (in case) to win 32.

Have you a best way to suggest me or a successful experience in a way like that.

Small specs :

- Display Texts and basic gfx on a full screen window (X11 or Win32)
on 640x400 or a bit more.
- 256 colors is far enough
- Display text using ttf or else fonts with few size variations
- Bitmap display (backgrounds, icons, ..)
- Basic line and polygons drawing
- Basic move of screen portions.
- No sound, no joystick, no sprite collisions and so on..



Thanks for your help and suggestions,

Greetz,

Mathieu

 

[Karl von Laudermann]

I've tried ruby-opengl, rubygame, rubysdl, rudl. Theses libs are
working great here (Debian Etch) but a good font rendering seem to be
hard (I fail to have a working ftgl install). And some dependencies
like boost.org are enormous, far in size and features of my needs.

Small specs :

- Display Texts and basic gfx on a full screen window (X11 or Win32)
on 640x400 or a bit more.
- 256 colors is far enough
- Display text using ttf or else fonts with few size variations
- Bitmap display (backgrounds, icons, ..)
- Basic line and polygons drawing
- Basic move of screen portions.
- No sound, no joystick, no sprite collisions and so on..

Sounds like you should probably try a full GUI library (fxruby,
wxruby, qtruby, ruby/gtk, Swing via JRuby, etc.). Create a window, put
a big ol' rich text control of some sort in the center, and populate
it as you wish. Or use multiple text label controls and graphic
canvases layed out as desired. I get the impression that the types of
libraries you've looked at so far are much lower level and are suited
for game developers who care about performance and efficiency, and
thus make you do more of the work that a good GUI library will do for
you, or hand off to the OS if it uses native controls.

 

[Mathieu Chappuis]

Hi Karl,

Sounds like you should probably try a full GUI library (fxruby,
wxruby, qtruby, ruby/gtk, Swing via JRuby, etc.). Create a window, put
a big ol' rich text control of some sort in the center, and populate
it as you wish. Or use multiple text label controls and graphic
canvases layed out as desired. I get the impression that the types of
libraries you've looked at so far are much lower level and are suited
for game developers who care about performance and efficiency, and
thus make you do more of the work that a good GUI library will do for
you, or hand off to the OS if it uses native controls.

You probably right, as a text-mode afficionados I've neglected such libs.

A threat live here about the choice between Fx and other.

Thanks for pointing that!