ALLEGTTF
Anti-aliased text output and font loading routines for Allegro
designed for DJGPP and Allegro
Version 1.8
By Doug Eleveld
D.J.Eleveld@anest.azg.nl
deleveld@dds.nl
TTF font loading code from the Freetype Project.
(see /source/freetype/licence.txt)
Request for help
ALLEGTTF was originally designed for use with Allegro and DOS.  Now that Allegro supports other platforms (Linux, Windows, etc), I would like to get ALLEGTTF working for all the platforms that Allegro supports.  Dan Bogdanov has already sent me some changes to get ALLEGTTF to work with Allegro/Linux however the Windows support for ALLEGTTF is still lacking.  I have done most of what I think needs to be done, but I am having problems accessing the _textmode variable in the Allegro DLL.  I know almost nothing about Windows programming, so I cannot do it all myself.  If you know some basics about Windows programming and want to contribute to ALLEGTTF, please mail me and we can get ALLEGTTF wiorking for Windows platforms.

#include <std.disclaimer.h>
"I do not accept responsibility for any effects, adverse or otherwise, that this code may have on you, your computer, your sanity, your dog, and anything else that you can think of.  Use it at your own risk."

What is ALLEGTTF
ALLEGTTF is a collection of functions to produce anti-aliased text output and TTF (True Type Font) loader, a GRX font loader and a bitmap font loader for use with Allegro and DJGPP.   Antialiased text means that fonts have 'soft' edges and blend into their backgrounds smoothly.  Antialiased fonts are useful because the look a lot better than non-antialiased fonts, expecially at low resolutions.

One day I saw some code that Domenic Cooney had put on his web page to draw antialiased text. He used transparant pixels to draw the antialiasing and I really liked what I saw.  I took his code and made some optimizations and re-wrote a lot of it.  Now it's a quite a bit faster in most graphic modes, especially when drawing a filled background (i.e. Allegro's text_mode >= 0).  It's quite a bit bigger too because there are now more than a few pretty well optimized routnes, which are called depending on the graphic mode colour depth and the text_mode.

I also found the Freetype Project on the net (see the file liscence.txt for links) which is simple ansi C code for loading True Type Font files into memory.  I simply added some routines to get Freetype and Allegro working well together.  I DID NOT write any of the files in the /source/freetype directory.  These files came from the Freetype Project.

ALLEGTTF draws text in 8 bit graphic modes with 6 different antialiasing levels.  This is also true  when Allegro's text_mode is >=0 in any graphic mode.  When in a 15,16,24 or 32 bit graphic mode and with text_mode is <0, then the text is drawn with 255 levels of antialiasing.

ALLEGTTF is not very useful without Allegro since it relies on many of