Re: [Devel] Direct accessing on winfont properties.

[David Turner]

Hi Yamano-Uchi,

> 
> Hello,
> 
> It is difficult that unification on font properties of "many" font
> formats.  So we can use TrueType font properties directly when we
> include "include"/internal/tttypes.h.  But we cannot use winfont
> properties because winfnt.h is in src/winfonts/ not
> "include"/internal/.  It is not convenient handling winfnts with a
> minor charset.
> 

You're not supposed to include anything from <freetype/internal/...>,
unless you're writing a FreeType module, as the content of this
directory might change, even dramatically, between releases of
the library.

In the case where you'd need to make some information available
to client applications, I'd recommend to create a new file in
<freetype/....> or even <freetype/winfonts/..>

You will also need to provide an optional component to extract
this information from FT_Face / FT_Size objects as well

Of course, it is ideal to separate the font-format specific tables
from the FreeType specific stuff in these tables.. :-)

> Is it a bug?
> 
No, it's simply that the Windows font driver was written rather
qhickly, and that no time was spent to really decide what kind
of table should be publicly accessible..

Be welcome to design a public API if you want to. I just don't
think that simply putting things in "internal" and accessing
them directly is a good solution in the long term..

Cheers,

- David

PS: By the way, if there are TrueType tables that you need to access,
    I'd suggest you to write a simple high-level interface to extract
    them for client applications, instead of relying on the content
    of "internal".