From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Tue Feb 26 2002 - 17:30:30 GMT
Couldn't agree more. Freetype offers countless benefits to us. We'll
have to make sure that the performance penalty isn't too high, but this
really shouldn't be an issue. This also isn't to mention the other cool
things that Freetype can do, such as its countless ueber-cool
font-drawing effects.
Dom
On Tue, 2002-02-26 at 12:24, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
> I have been looking into using the FreeType font renderer
> (www.freetype.org) , and I was rather suprprised how simple it
> would be to implement our drawChars and measureCharWidth
> functions with it.
>
> I was initially looking at this as a means to solve our Unix font
> problems, and there is no doubt in my mind that this is the way to
> go -- not only would using FreeType completely resolve the font
> mess, but we would also get rid off the Unicode->8-bit-locale
> translation that we currently have to do at every text-drawing and
> text-measuring operation.
>
> As I have been examining what FreeType offers, I came to the
> conclusion that we would in fact be well advised to use it from our
> XP code, getting rid off the platform specific measureCharWidth
> and drawChars functions. There are several good reasons for this:
>
> (1) We should be able to improve the WYSIWIGness of our screen
> output; on win32 in particular we currently struggle with
> cummulative truncating errors in width calculations for which there
> is no simple cure -- with FreeType we should be able to get a
> better precision.
>
> (2) We would be able to add font aliasing to all our platforms.
>
> (3) We would be able to use proper kerning on all platforms with
> very little coding effort. This is very desirable and at present would
> be lot of work to implement (in platform code).
>
> (4) We would be able to use the scalable fonts supported by
> FreeType on all our platforms -- i.e., you could use pfa/pfb fonts on
> Windows, if you wanted to. FreeType supports TrueType,
> OpenType, PostScript, CID keyed fonts, and others.
>
> (5) Finally, and IMO most importantly, having an xp font renderer
> would greatly simplify maintanance and further development. What
> has proved to be the worst nightmare in the bidi work, is getting
> RTL text out on the screen correctly under different OS's. For
> instance, the capbilities of the various flavours of win32 differ
> widely, with no standard way of determining what they are; inspite
> of hours of work and long nights, RTL text still does not display
> correctly on some flavours of win32 when using some fonts. We
> end up with unreliable heurstics trying to convince the system to
> do what we want it to do. We will have to relive this again and again
> when someone will get to getting bidi work on Mac, BeOS, QNX ...
> With FreeType we would have a single layout engine with single
> set of bugs and equal (and excellent) capabilities on all platforms.
>
> There is one drawback -- we may loose some OS specific
> capabilities. For instance some bidi-enabled win32 can do
> glyphshaping using OpenType fonts; FreeType2 at the moment
> cannot. I consider this a small price to pay. At the moment we do
> not make use of it, and will not in forseeable future. We will want
> this in the medium to long-term, but even then to do glyphshaping
> in the platform code would be a maintanance nightmare; the
> FreeType folk started a separate project on a layout library that will
> provide this functionality, so in long term there will be an xp
> solution.
>
>
> It seems to me that the benefits of using FreeType far outweight
> any drawbacks. If we can agree on this, then migrating to FreeType
> should be one of the first things to do after the 1.0 release.
>
> Tomas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Feb 26 2002 - 12:37:27 GMT