XML Hud AOA

[phjvh 0]

Hi,May be old news, but I managed to get an α (alpha symbol) in my HUD.Download a free Greek font and put it in the Font Dir.Use an a and Font="Greek"Jan"Beatus ille qui procul negotiis..."

[Guest Ron Freimuth]

>Hi,>>May be old news, but I managed to get an α (alpha symbol)>in my HUD.>Download a free Greek font and put it in the Font Dir.>Use an a and Font="Greek">Jan I wonder if that would work for the simple .. lines. Maybe not, I've tried using HTML characters and only a few work. But, that was with a 'common' font. 'Symbols' is a standard Windows font that includes many Greek characters. Maybe it has to be copied to the FS Font folder to be accessable. Finally, it would seem one could edit a font file and change a few of the characters to whatever pattern he needed. Ron

[phjvh 0]

Hi,I tried copy and paste of the alpha symbol from MSWord symbols into xml, but that didn't work.Only after putting the downloaded Greek Font into the Font Folder of MSFS9 and using a normal a (like I did with Quartz) it worked in a a with Font="Greek" in the section.Works also with b=Betha etc.Jan"Beatus ille qui procul negotiis..."

[Guest jprintz]

Did you have to "install" the font to make the alpha symbol show up, or is the font file just sitting in the FS9/font folder??? When I modified a font (arial) to use with one of my gauges, it was not enough to simply copy it into the font folder; I had to install it to make it show up in any gauges at all. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I've downloaded gauges that have their own font files, and didn't have to install the font. Just sitting in FS9/fonts was enough. I've never investigated font issues more thoroughly than that, but always found that puzzling....

[phjvh 0]

Hi,Just download, extract and put the file in the fs9/Fonts folder.Use normal Text in the and define Font="Greek"I use this one:http://www.lucius-hartmann.ch/diverse/gree...ocs/alkaios.zipJan"Beatus ille qui procul negotiis..."

[Varmint007 2]

I gave up on trying to find which characters work and don't in FS a long time ago. I created my own fonts for special characters and symbols and map them to standard characters like a,b,z, etc.Hint: You can use custom fonts for all kinds of things from pitch ladder rungs to nice anti-aliased circles to dashed lines, all nicely scalable. All you need is a cheap font editor and you're on your way. And because they're fonts, you can alter the color freely just like vectors, but without the overhead of defining all those points.Futher, you can define at which pointsize a font anti-aliases or grid-fits. By setting that value very high in a particular font, you can PREVENT it from anti-aliasing above a certain pointsize. That's useful in HUDs because of the horrible black edge artifacts in MSs font rendering. Although rotating an object about an axis will automatically cause it to anti-alias, it's only worse in fonts which start out that way. Bottom line, if it's not anti-aliased to begin with, it's much easier to read in a HUD.Just another use for custom fonts...--JonJust say "NO" to bitmaps:)

[Guest jprintz]

Sounds cool. Lots of good advice on these forums. I think I'll try that in the vectored version of my HUD. There are plenty of decent free font creators/editors out there too.One thing though... I do not completely understand all the antagonism towards gauge bitmaps in these forums. Yes, there is the anti-aliasing issue under certain conditions. Using the right color in the right lighting usually makes that disappear though. (I'm talking HUDs here.) And yes, there are neat ways to control the color and brightness of the elements if you use all vectors. Beyond that (and those are NOT insignificant advantages, granted), are there other big advantages to "all vectors" that I am missing?? The reason I ask is that, from my experimentation, it is nearly impossible to create the look and feel of certain complex gauges with vectors without taking a big performance hit. And the tradeoff simply has not been worth it. For example, could the attached HUD symbology be done with vectors (and a frame rate above 15 ;-) ??? How would you do the slanted and dotted (negative) pitch ladder bars? A new element for each horiontal line?http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/135278.jpg

[Varmint007 2]

I wouldn't call the aversion to using bitmaps antagonistic. Certainly they have their place, but IMO, not in a HUD, not most glass gauges.My primary reasons for avoiding them are: A) non-scalability. Bitmaps will not scale to all resolutions and remain sharp. They look particularly bad when contrasted with the rendering ports, and only get worse as they are scaled.:( The static nature of a bitmap prevents it from being color manipulated. In the case of a HUD, you can't even overlay a transparent rectangle to adjust the intensity (in 2D).The following image is of my HUD using all FONTS and some vectors (the bank angle scale is a vector ATM, but I plan to replace that with fonts as well). There is absolutely no performance hit over using bitmaps, and the advantages of clarity and flexibility are apparent.I'm not trying to sway anyone into not using bitmaps, but rather present a method which I feel is superior. The choice is of course up to you.--Jonhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/135321.txthttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/135322.jpg