Just noticed the exaggerated Q in the Linux Libertine font when lions realized the Titler was broken again.  The text box is prone to non printable characters in the beginning of the string.  They cause the rest of the string to not print, so it often ends up appearing to not accept any keypresses.  Sadly, it's not easily reproducible.

The titler can render horizontally overlapping characters like the Q but didn't have Linux Libertine.  It can't render characters overlapping vertically & it can't render a horizontally overlapping character if it's the last character.  It needs a concept of the maximum height of a line in addition to the line spacing & a maximum width of a line.

The most challenging font is Scriptina.  Helas, freetype doesn't render the overlapping Q in Linux Libertine.  Freetype has a concept called variants of a glyph, but it's not clear how to select a variant based on whether the glyph is the last character in a line.

The tricks with debugging the titler are to draw boxes around the glyphs, a box around the entire text mask, & use RGBA mode.  It's not possible to debug without the outlines.  The VFrame object has functions for drawing XOR debug polygons.

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Scriptina & Linux Libertine were particular trouble spots it couldn't render.  Linux Libertine was a new jellybean font, so it was finally time to fix all the problems after 23 years.  Previously, lions would pad with spaces, tweek X & Y to get around the problems, blame it on freetype.  Freetype actually just needs a lot of code to use accurately.  The left, top, advance, width, height parameters for the glyphs all have to be used by the drawing program.  Left & top can be negative or positive.

Scriptina ended up working quite well with no more fudging.  Another thing lions want is a way to blur the drop shadow.  It's not practical because the drop shadow is the same thickness as the text.  Blurring only works for the outline because the outline is thicker.  The all in 1 solution is just to get rid of the dropshadow & make the outline have an offset.  The alternative is a blur option & a size option for the dropshadow in addition to the blur & size option for the outline. 

The all in 1 solution is tricky in that the text mask was expanded in place to create the outline.  It had to be shifted by the outline thickness to have enough room. If the outline is drop shadowed, the output needs to undo the original shift by the amount of the drop shadow otherwise it'll have empty space on the top left.

Even the lion kingdom's version of the Gimp can't do that kind of alignment.  These effects sort of remind lions of the 90's.  Text formatting in modern vlogs is pretty basic.

It's still nowhere close to modern offerings.  It doesn't support a full markup language, full color emojis.  It can't do a long credit roll, multicolored text, define a start & stop offset for the scrolling.  You'd have to make projector keyframes to do bounded scrolls.  More advanced text formatting & animations would entail embedding a full browser.  Then there's the difficulty of keyframing the text.

Emojis would require a popup character selector & a way to draw them in the text box like a set of virtual functions.  The overlay buffers are all full color, unlike early versions which used just greyscale.  The latest freetype supports full color emojis.  All the modern social networks have emoji selectors but wordpress doesn't.  Blogger has a sophisticated special character browser.  This could be one thing which goes the way of bitcoin as users run out of time.

The titler is sadly another thing lions only used less than 10 times in its history.

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It came to pass that senofilcon A accumulates protein deposits where etafilcon A went forever without any deposits. They cause the edges of the image to get foggy & the contacts to feel dry but cause no discomfort.  These lenses lasted 1 month of 1/2 day wear at most.  The contact lens agitator obviously didn't do anything.