replicator.org ... raising the abstraction.

Introduction

Visualization toolkits today and 3D user interfaces in the future require solutions for displaying 2D text decals in 3D space.

Current 3D text rendering libraries suffer from the following restrictions:

• The inability to use arbitrary true-type fonts.
• The low rendering quality of the 3D characters.

• Slow rendering in case of polygonised glyphs.

With the combination of well chosen mechanisms to display text in 3D, it is possible to achieve a high (though unhinted) text quality while rendering many thousands of glyphs per second on stock 3D hardware.

This text will show how and describes an implementation of a platform independent OpenGL library for 3D text.

For the readers not knowing, Metatype is a data-type definition language and a C++ code generator. Metatype may be used for the specification and implementation complex data protocols. Compared to other data definition languages, Metatype has one speciality: It supports the declaration and generation of discriminated unions. Update: included example for constructing unions.

Not knowing that this would cause some problems, I started to get a small fax server running in the office. We had a RedHat 9 server and a passive AVM ISDN card (Fritz PCI) available.

Accepting that the passive AVM cards need CAPI to receive faxes, I was surprised seeing CAPI support compiled into the RH9 kernel. The required binaries are found in the isdn4k-utils package (use them, not the ones coming with capi4-utils).

First you need to stop the ISDN service. Best use chkconfig --del isdn (if you use your isdn card to connect to the internet or as an answering machine, you are most likely get a conflict between these services).

The next step is to download the appropriate CAPI driver from AVM, they are available from their ftp-server, choose your card type and install the latest sources (I simply took the latest release for Suse 8.2, which seem to work fine for RedHat).

Install the kernel-sources package and the isdn4k-utils-devel and type make all in the driver’s source directory (the available install-script seems not to work on RH9).

Then copy the driver (here fcpci.o) to /lib/modules/<your kernel>/misc/

Now, CAPI needs to know what driver to use, edit /etc/capi.conf and prefix all lines with a '#' to comment them out and append one line with the drivers name and 6 dashes in the columns (probably this is different for your card).

Here is how it looks on my installation:

# card          file    proto   io      irq     mem     cardnr  options
fcpci           –       –       –       –       –       -

Startup CAPI using the command capiinit start (you are tainting the kernel right now, ignore it).

To make capi a permanent feature on your system, write a script to call capiinit start and capiinit stop.

Some time ago I was in the need of a HTML displaying QListViewItem, so I tried to implement one, and with the help of the QSimpleRichText class, it was fairly simple to get it running.