Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

Tools menu
Figure 5-7 shows a screenshot of Processing’s Tools menu.
The Tools menu contains the following five commands:
Auto Format (Cmd+T on OS X; Ctrl+T on Windows): This command attempts to
format the code layout for optimal readability. Skipped lines, also referred to as
whitespace, are retained. Syntax errors, such as missing semicolons, are not corrected.
Auto Format was originally called “beautify,” which is the name of a similar
function in Processing’s forebear, Design By Numbers (DBN). Here is an example of
how Auto Format works. If I type the following code into the text editor and select
Auto Format:
void setup(){}void draw(){}
then the code will be reformatted to the following:
void setup(){
}
void draw(){
}
Figure 5-7. Screen capture of
Processing’s Tools menu
THE PROCESSING ENVIRONMENT
Create Font: One of the challenges of designing for the Web is the incompatibility
of system resources such as installed fonts, which will often be different from
machine to machine and across platforms. One solution is to use only a very limited
set of fonts that can be assumed to be installed on most systems—such as
Arial, Times, and Sans. However, from a design perspective, this is pretty limiting.
Another solution is to bundle bitmap glyphs (actual raster graphics of each character
in a font family) with a project to allow the use of fonts that aren’t likely to be
installed on a user’s machine. The Create Font command does just this. The command
opens the Create Font dialog box, which allows you to select any font
installed within your system (see Figure 5-8). This dialog includes the options Size,
Filename, Smooth (for anti-aliasing), and All Characters. The font generated is a copy
of an existing font in your system, created in the VLW font format and installed
within a data subdirectory in the current sketch directory. Similar to loading other
media into Processing, a data directory is automatically created, if one doesn’t
already exist. There are some memory concerns involved in creating fonts this way.
The larger the font size you specify, the more memory the font will use, as each
font includes the actual raster information needed to draw the individual characters;
normally, fonts are created using vector data. In addition, the Smooth option
also requires a little more memory, as does the All Character option, which includes
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