Support for letterSpacing possible?

[ArronFerguson]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if there's the possibility of supporting the letterSpacing property of the multistyle-text object? I imagine it may be fairly complicated since the width needs to be calculated by each individual tag and this may affect word wrap and its size.

Anyways, figured I'd put that out there.

Thanks again for taking care of the updating with the setTagStyle method, that really is useful!

Arron

[bluepichu]

I should have a bit of extra time tomorrow, so I'll try to take a look.

[ArronFerguson]

Thanks for looking into it!

[bluepichu]

Is this for a bitmap font? If not, it's not possible since text objects are backed by a canvas, which doesn't support character spacing. (See pixijs/pixijs#1748.)

The bahvior of character spacing at the edges between styles is also a bit interesting. For example, suppose wide has a large letterSpacing, and narrow has it set to 0. How should <narrow>abc<wide>def</wide>ghi</narrow> be rendered? abcd e fghi or abc d e f ghi?

[ArronFerguson]

Matthew,

It's for outline fonts, not bitmap. Yeah, I was thinking probably not. No worries, you can close it. Figured I'd check with the experts though.

:)

[bluepichu]

I'll leave this open, since letterSpacing probably should work for bitmap fonts at least.

I might also be able to make it work for non-bitmaps by simply drawing one character at a time - which would probably be a performance hit and might cause some fonts to do strange things, but would only kick in if letterSpacing is non-zero. The only way to find out is to try. 😄

Of course, we'd still need to decide on abcd e fghi vs. abc d e f ghi. Another possibility I just thought of is to have the letterSpacing be evenly divided on both sides of a character - which would give abc-d e f-ghi, where - is half the width of a space.

[bluepichu]

Never mind about bitmap fonts - I didn't realize that there was a separate class for those in Pixi. We'd need to add any support for bitmap fonts before we could think of adding this feature for them, and I currently don't see any need to unless there's a particular interest in bitmap fonts.

Anyway, I'll see if drawing one character at a time works for non-bitmaps.

[bluepichu]

Turns out it was surprisingly straightforward.

As for my earlier question, I went with the third option - abc-d e f-ghi.

Edit:

That has letterSpacing set to -1 for "multiline" and to 5 for "multistyle".

[bluepichu]

PR filed: #40.

[ArronFerguson]

OMG wow, that was fast! Thank you so much!

[tleunen]

@bluepichu What's the value of letterSpacing actually? What does represent a letterSpacing of 0 and a letter spacing of 5? Is it an offset in pixels?

[bluepichu]

Yes.