Scott builds Software

More iPhone Cool Projects

One of the more popular posts on this blog is a little list of iPhone fonts. When I first started writing iPhone apps, I was puzzled by the lack of documentation on font names within the wonderful little devices. My post gets visited daily by dozens of programmers who, apparently, run across the same issue.

My love/hate relationship with fonts began in college. I made pizza and beer money by encoding my friends’ papers into Scribe, an early word processing program. Later in grad school I learned how to hack LaTex, and once contributed a few morsels to the AAAI library for publishing AI papers. After my PhD thesis my advisor introduced me to a mailing list at CERN, run by a guy named Tim. I was smitten BY his vision of a World Wide Web. I looked for months to find Web work at IBM, and finally landed a job building a rendering engine for IBM’s first browser. Most of my coding efforts were spent wrestling OS/2 presentation manager and… you guessed it… fonts. They seemed inescapable.

Fast forward a decade and a half. At the beginning of my iPhone career, I landed a sweet deal working on an iPhone game for DreamWorks. We were cruising along when the creative team decided to use a custom font. Uh oh. I faced having to rewrite a lot of Apple’s font mechanisms with very little investment. I didn’t have time. I needed something practical, something that would let me build a font package quickly.

The project tapped some dusty memories from Scribe, LaTex, OS/2, and now OpenGL. The end result was a quick, useful set of classes and tools for converting any TrueType font into a mipmapped OpenGL font on the iPhone. Word spread, and soon I found myself writing a chapter from APress about the experience.

I hope the chapter saves you, and other programmers, tons of time in writing and building quick, lightweight font engines!

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Apps, Tips by Scott