From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Apr 26 2002 - 04:09:16 EDT
--- Tomas Frydrych <tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net>
wrote: >
> > Am I right in believing we don't actually need to
> > build FreeType on platforms that already use the
> real
> > TrueType such as Windows and Mac? FreeType is an
> > exact reproduction of the TrueType APIs right? I
> also
> > think TrueType is probably faster than FreeType
> and
> > of course it has the patent on hinting which is
> > usually turned off in FreeType for legal reasons.
>
> No. We would use FreeType on all our platforms. Two
> basic
> reasons. (1) To use any native text handling
> routines, we would
> have to port Pango to platform XY, that is well
> beyond our
> resources (it means writing the interface between
> Pango itself and
> platform XY, plus writing the interfaces between
> each existing
> language module and platform XY).
But Pango already has a Win32 back end.
Also I don't understand 100% how a FreeType back end
is different to a TrueType back end. Is FreeType not
compatible with TrueType on the level I thought?
Having both TrueType and FreeType on an OS just sounds
ugly.
> (2) By using Pango with
> FreeType we will get a consistent (and very decent)
> capabilities
> across all the platforms controlled from XP code.
> One of the worst
> nightmares with bidi build is getting consistent
> behaviour on various
> flavours of windows, and I cannot wait to get rid
> off the native
> windows textdrawing calls.
>
> I am not worried about FT2 performance too much, and
> as for the
> patented algorithms, many people could still use
> them, since not
> all of us live in countries where Apple holds the
> patents :).
Myself included but not too many church secretaries
are going to edit their FreeType makefile and rebuild
to get AbiWord to antialias like all their other
software already does automatically.
> > We'll be using Xft on *nix right? FreeType is
> just a
> > glyph renderer, not a Font Manager.
> No we will not, but Pango with FT2 has an internal
> font manager
> that is cut-and-pasted from xft.
So it's equivalent to using Xft?
> > Another thing I've been wondering about is that
> since
> > there is pangowin32, pangoft, and pangox, what
> would
> > be used on Mac and shouldn't there be pangomac
> that
> > used ATSUI or Mac's TrueType?
>
> As I explained above, the only realistic option is
> using FT on all
> platforms.
So are you suggesting using pangoft instead of
pangowin32 even on Win32?
Andrew Dunbar.
> Tomas
=====
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