>Psychtoolbox>PsychDemos

DrawMirroredTextDemo([upsideDown=0])
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Trivial example of drawing mirrored text. This demonstrates how to use
low-level OpenGL API functions to apply geometric transformations to
the drawn objects.

Will draw a text string, once in normal orientation, and once mirrored.
The mirrored text is either mirrored left<->right, or upside down if you
set the optional ‘upsideDown’ flag to 1. At each key press, the text
will be redrawn at an increasing size, until after a couple of redraws
the demo will end.

The demo also draws a bounding box around the text string to demonstrate
how you can find out about the bounds of a text string via
Screen(‘TextBounds’).

The mirroring is implemented by first defining a geomtric transformation
which will apply to all further drawn shapes and text strings. Then the
text string is drawn via Screen(‘DrawText’) – thereby affected by the
geometric transform. Then the transform is undone to “normal”.

How does this work?

1. The command Screen(‘glPushMatrix’); makes a “backup copy” of the
   current transformation state – the default way of drawing.

2. The command Screen(‘glTranslate’, w, xc, yc, 0); translates the
   origin of the coordinate system (which is normally located at the
   upper-left corner of the screen) into the geometric center of the
   location of the text string. We find the center xc,yc by retrieving the
   bounding box of the text string Screen(‘TextBounds’), then calculating
   the center of that box [xc, yc].

3. The Screen(‘glScale’, w, x, y, z); will scale all further drawn
   objects by a factor ‘x’ in x-direction (horizontal), ‘y’ in y-direction
   (vertical), ‘z’ in z-direction (depths). Scaling happen with respect to
   the current origin. As we just set the origin to be the center of the
   text string in step 2, the object will “scale” around that point. A
   value of -1 effectively switches the direction along the ‘x’ axis for a
   horizontal flip, or along the ‘y’ axis for an upside down vertical flip.
   Values with a magnitude other than 1 would scale the whole text up or
   down in size.

4. The command Screen(‘glTranslate’, w, -xc, -yc, 0); translates the
   origin of the coordinate system back to the upper-left corner of the
   screen. This to make sure that all coordinates provided later on are
   wrt. to the usual reference frame.

Steps 2,3 and 4 are internally merged to one mathematical transformation:
The flipping of all drawn shapes and objects around the screen position
[xc,yc] – the center of the text string.

1. We Screen(‘DrawText’) the text string –> The flipping applies.

2. We undo the whole transformation via Screen(‘glPopMatrix’) thereby
   restoring the original “do nothing” transformation from the backup copy
   which was created in step 1. All further drawing is therbey unaffected
   by the flipping, so we can draw the second copy of the text and the
   bounding box.

Besides the scaling and translation transform for moving, rescaling and
flipping drawn objects and shapes, there is also the Screen(‘glRotate’)
transform to apply rotation around axis.

This transformations apply to any drawing command, not only text strings!
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see also: PsychDemos