RE: [Devel] What should we do for China's Linux National Standard?

[Conner]

> FreeType must have these functions:
> 
> 1.Support displaying bold, italic, bold italic Chinese fonts.(Now
> you haven't achieved it.)

I think what Tang means here is to support artifical bold and italic
functions, which are really desirable for CJK fonts, since most of them
only have one regular style because of the large amount of glyphs. 

At the moment, what we cjk users normally do is to patch Xft and
fontconfig. For artificial bold, we patch Xft to embolden glyphs from
freetype and patch fontconfig to make a fake bold style. For artificial
italic, it's already done by fontconfig. However, the results are only
acceptable and these patches are tricky and inefficient. I think it
would be very helpful if freetype itself can include these functions. 

> 2.When the TrueType font [size] is small, use bitmap font to display
> Chinese characters.  (Now FreeType can do it, but the English
> alphabets are ugly).

I think it's because you didn't enable the bytecode interpreter, though
it will cause the patent issue. However, even enabling the bytecode
interpreter, the results of monochrom fonts are still not satisfied.
There are many problems in dropouts, kerning and noise and I can see
it's getting worse after 2.1.7 (more noise). I think the main reason is
that freetype is now concentrated in gray mode, not monochrom mode. 

I think one way to solve the problem is to use embedded bitmaps for
every glyphs, not only Chinese characters.

> 3.Support GB18030 font.
I think this is a job of fontconfig, not freetype.