Scripting Guide • Three-Dimensional Scenes • Drawing Text
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Drawing Text
As shown in the “Hello World” example above, text is added to a scene using the Text command.
Text( horz, vert, size, string, <billboard>)
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horz can be Left, Center, or Right justification.
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vert can be Top, Middle, Baseline, or Bottom justification.
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size represents the height of a capital letter M in model coordinates.
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string is the text to draw.
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billboard is an optional argument that causes the text to rotate with the model. Text with this option always faces the viewer.
The font is always the JMP Text font. You can change the text font from the preferences menu, but because of the way JMP caches fonts for scenes, changes might not take effect until JMP is restarted.
Note: Text is not part of the standard OpenGL definition.
Using Text with Rotate and Translate
The following example uses the text command in conjunction with the Translate and Rotate commands.
/* make a scene box...holds an OpenGL scene */
scene = SceneBox( 600, 600 );
 
/* put the scene in a window */
NewWindow( "Example 2", scene );
 
scene << Perspective( 45, 3, 7 );
/* the "lens" is 45 degrees, near is 3 units from the camera, far is 7 */
scene << Translate( 0.0, 0.0, -4.5 );
/* move the world so 0,0,0 is visible in the camera */
scene << Rotate( 30, 0, 1, 0 );
/* rotate the first text about the Y (vertical on screen) axis */
scene << Color( 1, 0, 0 );
/* pure red */
scene << Text( "center", "baseline", .2, "First Red String" );
scene << Translate( 0.0, 0.0, -2.0 );
/* the next string is even farther away from the camera */
scene << Rotate( 30, 0, 1, 0 );
/* rotate the second text about the Y (vertical on screen) axis */
scene << Color( 0, 1, 0 );
/* pure green */
scene << Text( "center", "baseline", .2, "Second Green very long string" );
scene << Update;
/* update the displaybox in the window using the current display list */
Rotating and Translating Text Strings
Note the green string is extending backwards beyond the far clipping plane. Change the 7 to 10 in the Perspective command to see the complete string.