Re: [ft-devel] Roadmap for supporting external Drivers?

[Ian Britten]

David Turner wrote:

> sorry for not answering this earlier, I'm just too busy.

No problem - Everyone is 'too busy' (Myself included)!
[ Note though that you may want to skim through some of my recent
postings, if you want all the background of what's going on... ]

> the answer is that there is absolutely no roadmap to expose the font 
> driver interface publicly. the fact that the "internal" headers were 
> distributed in previous releases of the library was a distribution error 
> on our part.

[ snip ]
Again, my apology for not bringing this up earlier when you guys were
making the changes.  We weren't really in a position to upgrade FT at
that time, and obviously didn't fully appreciate the ramifications
of what what being done.

Irregardless of the problems it's currently causing me, I understand
your goal, and can't really object to it (After all, it's your
project! ;) ).  Even in my own code, I work hard to keep internal
things internal.

I must confess though that I got the impression from recent discussions
that writing a driver was something that was intended to be supported,
which is why I continued trying to simply 'port' our current code.
If you're saying that isn't the case, then I fear that I may be
'stuck between a rock and a hard place'.  Suddenly not being able to
access our own fonts any more would leave our customers quite unhappy.

> if there is a specific feature that you implemented through this 
> interface, we recommend that you file a feature request for it and we'll 
> see what we can do to add a corresponding public API to support it.

I'll do that.
I guess a simple description is "Write a driver for a custom file format,
using supported interfaces".  Would the sample I posted (Jun 10) be
sufficient to clarify my needs?

> I hope this clarifies the situation and that we'll be able to find a way 
> to help you in a manageable way.

I hope so too.  Please let me know if you have any questions, or if
there's anything I can do.
Many thanks for your input.

Ian