Re: [ft-devel] FreeType patches to support amalgamation

[Vinnie]

> Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:02:43 -0500

> From: Alexei Podtelezhnikov <address@hidden>
>
> You planing this for Stone Age people who do not know how to use
> make. I rest my case.

Actually, that is true.

My target audience includes musicians or artists who are beginning
to dabble in C / C++ programming. The are predominantly using
XCode on Mac OS X, with the remainder on Windows with a free
copy of Visual Studio Express.

The bulk of these users do not know how to use Make, and can't be
bothered to download additional dependencies (like visiting the FreeType
home page, extracting the sources, and performing a build).

My open source offerings have to come in a single archive - if I
require that they use SVN or GIT to retrieve the sources, a non trivial
percentage of visitors will be unable or unwilling to perform the extra
steps required.

Usage of FreeType for this scenario follows a very predictable pattern:
the user wants to try their hand at writing a VST audio plugin, desires
a cool looking interface that mimics some analog device (examples:
http://www.midictrl.com/midictrl_new.jpg, http://i49.tinypic.com/120o7j5.jpg),
and then wants their embedded fonts to look good at small point sizes.

With an amalgamated version of FreeType I can add support for hinted
fonts to my open source offerings, while including the entire FreeType
distribution as a single source file instead of a large tree.