[ft-devel] Starting work on the OpenType code

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi,

Like Owen already mentioned, I'm starting to work on the Opentype
(a.k.a otlayout/) code that is copied into Pango and Qt among
other systems.

My immediate plan is, to help with the 2.1.10 release, to get the
opentype code out of Pango, merge fixes from Qt and my own work,
get rid of FreeType internals and release it.  Some issues that
come to my mind follow:

- At the moment I don't plan to release a library, for not adding
yet another dependency, just a shared code base that Pango and Qt
can synch with one in a while.  Is it what people are most
comfortable with for the time being?

- The next issue is where to host it.  I'm fine with
freedesktop.org, but starting a project there may take a while
(basically you need to find someone on IRC, otherwise email
doesn't work).  Hosting it in FreeType CVS is another option.
What do people recommend?

- Another one is, for code to be shared between Qt and Pango, it
probably means that I cannot use glib, right?  That's a little
pain all the time.  Since I'm not releasing a library, I can
simply use my own symbols and Pango and Qt maintainers need to
define them to match their system.  What's wrong with depending
on FreeType still, but just not the private headers?

- What is the timeframe people expect/need to see this commno
codebase out?


For a longer term plan, I wish to rewrite the code to use mmapped
OpenType tables from the font itself instead of loading them im
memory.  For this, people suggested that I can use the otvalid/
module to validate the OpenType tables.  This raised the
following questions for me:

- Why was the opentype code removed from FreeType originally?  Is
it going to join back or not?

- How is the opentype code usable without FreeType?  In other
words, if we need otvalid/ from FreeType, the most reasonable way
is to make the opentype code a FreeType module too.  To rephrase
my question, does Pango and Qt work on any platform without
needing FreeType (but needing the opentype code)?


Regards,
--behdad
http://behdad.org/