RE: [Devel] Freetype on EPOC Devices

[Graham Asher]

Dixon,

you asked:

<<<<<<
Currently, I'm doing a font rasterizer for my EPOC device.
We have our own font format which is basically compressed bitmap fonts.
My font rasterizer is supposed to extract the required fonts, decompress and
render them on my EPOC screen.
Will Freetype2 be useful in my project?
If so, I would be grateful if you can show any examples or similar work done
with freetype.
>>>>>>

I wrote the Open Font System for EPOC, which includes the rasterizer
framework, so I am probably the best person to advise you...

There is no need to use FreeType unless your rasterizer already uses the
FreeType library. What you need to do is write a rasterizer by deriving a
class from the abstract base class COpenFontRasterizer and putting it into a
DLL with a single exported function that creates objects of that class.

Versions of the Symbian SDK from version 6.0 onwards have reasonably good
documentation on the Open Font System and rasterizer framework (I wrote it,
rather quickly I am afraid, and passed it to the Symbian SDK people, who put
it into their house style). The documentation includes sample code from an
earlier version of Symbian's TrueType rasterizer, which uses FreeType.

If you have any difficulties please let me know.

Best regards,

Graham Asher
formerly a contractor for Symbian; now a freelance software architect