[Devel] PFR font driver available in current CVS sources

[David Turner]

Hello,

  just to inform you that a PFR font driver was added in
  the CVS sources last week. It's pretty small but doesn't
  implement the following:

   A - PFR hinting (which is patented anyway), it thus
       relies on the auto-hinter

   B - kerning and track kerning support

   C - embedded bitmap support

   D - synthetic emboldening.

B and C should be added in a few days or a week. D might come
as a general module to FT2 in the near future. I already have
a pretty good algorithm that works reliably with fixed-point
computations (it completely avoids intersection computations
by using angles instead, so there is no numerical stability
problems here), but I need time to adapt it to the sources..

Note that this code was written by myself some months ago. Since
I recently changed jobs and quitted the freelance-consulting
business, I much prefer to see it used rather than locking it
in a closet.. Consider yourself lucky :-)

By the way, the PFR format is really _poor_, and the mere
_creation_ of PFR fonts is also patented by BitStream so don't
expect too strong of a support for this within FreeType..


Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project (www.freetype.org)