Re: A DVI viewer with freetype2

[Stefan Seefeld]

David Turner wrote:

> > VFlib is designed not for a simple set of multiple font drivers;
> > its higher layer is imprtant point.
> >
> 
> Exactly, it has many features that will never be part of FT2 itself.
> Something like a "FreeType Text Service" was hinted, but let's wait
> for the release of FT2 :o)

Sure. I would really love to see such a higher level API (including
text processing functionality) evolve on top of it.
And as Cesar pointed out, FT2 is in many respects quite different from
FT1, especially much cleaner through its modular structure. Couldn't
both projects merge in such a way that VFlib becomes the above mentioned
layer on top of FT2 ? I guess all I'm asking is that the design of VBlib
reflects the recent modifications made to freetype, so that it factors
out the low level functionality and integrates them into FT2 or something...

I'm still wondering which level the perfect entry point is for the berlin
display server to communicate with it.

Oh, and this brings me to another point: Since the FT2 notion of glyph
is quite generic (i.e. includes outlines and various raster formats),
do you think it makes sense to abstract the font rendering away from our
DrawingKit ?
A DrawingKit being the encapsulation of a display and a renderer for it,
would it be possible to treat font management on a higher level and then only
step down to the drawingkit level to do the actual rendering (rasterization 
etc.) ?
I'm aware of the fact that still the glyph's sizes will vary because of the
device dependent nature of glyph rendering (hinting) but it would be much closer
to WYSIWYG. Specifically, given a drawing kit which renders to postscript, would
it be efficient to use FT2 to do the font management instead of postscript's 
own ?

Regards,        Stefan
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Stefan Seefeld
Departement de Physique
Universite de Montreal
email: address@hidden

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