[ft-devel] new Pledgie campaign

[Werner LEMBERG]

This is a call for a new Pledgie campaign to support my expenses in
2014.  Thanks to all donors, the last campaign was successful, and all
goals have been reached!

  https://pledgie.com/campaigns/24434

If your company is using FreeType in your product, and you care about
continuing support and further development, please contribute to my
funding effort so I can continue to bring the best text rendering to
your devices!

Alternatively, direct donations to my PayPal account are also highly
welcome :-)


Roadmap
-------

Besides user support and fixing bugs, your money will help me
implement the following issues.

. Setting up a test framework for FreeType. This is a huge, long-term
  undertaking that will ensure both stability and reliability of the
  library.  The idea is to collect test cases (mainly broken fonts)
  that cover as much source code as possible.  Another idea to
  investigate is the development of scripts that can generate both
  valid and invalid input data to systematically increase the coverage
  of executed library code, including the unlikely cases.  Finally,
  images of valid, well-rendered input fonts could be collected: As
  soon as a change to the rendering image gets applied, a comparison
  run with those images should detect rendering regressions.

. Further improvements to the auto-hinter.  Right now, the module for
  Indic support is a dummy, and support for the family of Arabic
  scripts is completely missing.  Both investigation and research is
  necessary to find out how much auto-hinting is possible and useful,
  and whether other, completely different scripts can be supported at
  all.

. Right now, rendering Type 1 and CID-keyed fonts is the weakest part
  of FreeType.  However, we now have a brand-new module for handling
  CFF.  Given that CFF is very similar to Type 1, it should be not too
  difficult to use and/or extend the CFF code so that Type 1 fonts can
  be handled, too.

. Explore whether it makes sense to merge FreeType with (parts of) the
  HarfBuzz library.  Since version 2.5.3, FreeType already links to
  HarfBuzz to use its abilities for scanning OpenType layout features,
  and more integration might be sensible for both libraries.

. More improvements to this website.  Last year I’ve redesigned the
  FreeType website.  However, a large bunch of documents are still
  using the old design, and some of them are also no longer up to
  date.

Thanks in advance for your support!


    Werner