Future

  + Write a custom SpriteFont renderer

  + Support for \t in drawing calls

  + Word wise line breaking

  + Make \n work (including for centered and right-aligned text)

  + Add support for kerning

  + Use VertexPositionNormalTexture for the text to allow for
    texturing and lighting to work

2.0.0

  + BitmapFont and associated classes removed from library. This is a major
    compatibility break, but I don't want to maintain a parallel
    implementation of the font rendering code, now that Microsoft has
    released XNA 1.0 Refresh with built-in font rendering code.

  + Importer now serializes into an XNA SpriteFont compatible format,
    allowing for imported fonts to be loaded and used by the XNA SpriteFont
    class as if they had been created with the Microsoft Importer

    The Nuclex/FreeType importer is a bit faster than the Microsoft one,
    provides slightly better quality (this is a matter of taste, of course)
    and offsets fonts so the VertexBatch.DrawString() method aligns the
    text's baseline with the target Y coordinate.

  + Added vector-based fonts. By switching the content pipeline processor
    to the vector font processor, you can import any TrueType font in
    vector-based form. This enables many new effects, such as smoothly
    zooming text, high quality rotating text and usage of the vertices for
    any font character on your own.

  + Outlined text, filled flat text and extruded 3d text implemented on top
    of the vector-based font importer

1.2.0

  + 1.1.0 still had problems with the XBox 360 because the XBox apparently
    is unable to update smaller regions within a texture or vertex buffer.

    Thanks to Peter Pashley, these issues have finally been adressed and
    unless my own stupidity messed things up (again!) Nuclex.Fonts 1.2.0
    should have no more issues.

    There are some minor performance issues left on the XBox360 that will
    be adressed at a later time. Namely, the first time a character is used,
    it will eat up some performance. Successive frames won't be affected,
    however, since the character will be in the cache after that.

  + The TextManager component now greatly improves rendering speed by
    making better use of vertex batching.

    For the curious: the DrawString() method has to flush the vertices
    to the graphics card after each call to ensure no unwanted surprises
    in the drawing order when you mix text rendering with other drawing
    calls. Thus, it can not make effective use of vertex batching. The
    TextManager, on the other hand, can postpone flushing the vertices
    to the graphics card until all the strings have been drawn.

  + Due to popular demand, newline ('\n') support has been added!

    This is still a work-in-progress feature. It will not yet yield the
    correct results when used for centered or right-aligned text.
    Automatic word-wise line breaking and tab ('\t') spacing haven't
    been completed either and will be provided with a future release.

  + Font character bounding box is now expressed in pixels. The importer
    in 1.1.0 had a minor glitch that would save the font's bounding box
    in font units rather than pixels.

1.1.0

  + The alpha part of the drawing color is now respected,
    allowing semi-transparent text to be rendered

  + Fonts now provide a bounding box that makes it easier to properly align
    text and calculate the line height amongst other things

  + Fonts now use BGRA-32 bitmaps. The original release used alpha8,
    which turned out to be not that widely supported. Even the XBox 360
    cannot cope with this format. The new release should work on
    the XBox 360 now!

  + Custom effects can be passed when rendering fonts. This allows for all
    kinds of distortion, recoloring and touch-up effects in the text

  + FreeType library in the importer has been upgraded to FreeType 2.3.0

  + New Text manager that helps queueing text until the rest of the drawing
    commands has been finished to ensure text is on top of everything else.


1.0.1

  No source code changes, just noticed that VC++ 2005 SP1 + SP1 for Vista
  creates binaries that don't run with the normal
  VC 2005 Runtime Redistributables and recompiled the importer on an
  XP system without the SP1 for Vista update.


1.0.0

  First completed release