[GSOC 2022]: Integrate FreeType with alternative rendering engines

[Anurag Thakur]

Hello everyone!

 

I am Anurag Thakur, a first-year undergraduate student pursuing Computer Science.

I am interested in contributing to the project “Integrate FreeType with alternative rendering engines” as part of GSOC 2022 and have been learning about it for some time.

 

Reading through the mailing list discussions and building on the work of other contributors, I have been successful in creating prototype renderer module for FreeType that

is based on the font-rs rasteriser. The renderer module is written in C and is very barebones at the moment, since I wanted to discuss with the community and wait for an official approval for

my proposal before investing too much effort in any particular direction.

 

Since the parsing improvements of font-rs don’t completely apply to FreeType due to the requirement of hinting etc., I have been focusing on the rasteriser improvements, i.e., a dense data structure

for storing the accumulation buffer, that is better suited for SIMD.

 

Having briefly studied the renderers mentioned at FreeType’s GSOC page, I believe the best course of action would be to first properly integrate a font-rs based renderer in FreeType

and then working on optimizing the implementation by studying the code of font-go and fontdue.

 

I am currently studying the code of Fontdue and since it started as a fork of font-rs I hope integration will not be too tough.

Pathfinder seems to be very different from the other renderers, I need to study more about it, and will try to determine the best way to integrate it with FreeType.

 

I am also working on a way to properly benchmark the different implementations and would appreciate any pointers regarding it.

 

I would be grateful if the community could point me towards other font-rendering implementations that could be of interest to FreeType. Any research project or prototype that

can bring performance improvements is welcome.

Any other insights or guidance regarding this project would be greatly appreciated.

 

I have submitted my draft proposal to the GSOC website, and humbly request the mentors to take a look at it and provide feedback.

 

 

Regards

Anurag