>Psychtoolbox>PsychDemos

DrawHighQualityUnicodeTextDemo

This demo shows how to draw high-quality, anti-aliased text, and some
japanese text encoded in Unicode.

MacOS/X has text fonts with support for japanese characters preinstalled,
so this should just work out of the box. Have a look at the code of the
demo on how to select a suitable font, and how to read unicode text from
the filesystem. The (commented out) reading code for SHIFT_JIS -> Unicode
conversion would only work on recent Matlab releases. Older releases need
different approaches - also different wrt. PowerPC vs. IntelMac. That’s
why we hard-coded the text in this demo – Want to have it working even
on old Matlab 6…

On MS-Windows you will need to install the special east-asian font
support kit in order to be able to draw japanese text.
How to do this? See…

http://www.coscom.co.jp/japanesefont/index.html

with some more info here:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_windows.html#japanese

After that, text drawing seems to “just work” with our “Courier New”
font. If you don’t install the font pack, you’ll just see funny little
squares instead of nice japanese characters…

On MacOS/X you have the choice between three different text
rendering/layouting methods, as selectable by the Screen preference
setting ‘TextRenderer’: The default is 1, which selects Apple’s ATSU text
renderer. A setting of 0 would also select ATSU but would use a different
method for layout of text. Each method has its own weaknesses in that it
will have trouble drawing text in some special fonts correctly, so you
may have to choose the method based on the font to get best results.
Typical standard fonts are handled correctly by both methods. A setting
of 2 will use the Linux text rendering plugin (see “help DrawTextPlugin”)
which in our experience handles all fonts well and is of superior
performance to the OSX ATSU renderer. However, given that historically
ATSU was used on OSX for many years and each layout and rendering method
will give slightly different text appearance, for reason of consistency
we leave the default setting for OSX on 1, instead of using the superior
setting 2.