RE: unicode?

[Feinberg, Matthew]

AFAIK, FreeType just renders glyphs in the font based on character
indicies.  It doesn't render entire text strings; that's up to the
application to do.  That means you'll need to write a function to read
characters from a UTF8 string and render them.

For Unicode text in UCS-2 or UCS-4 format, it's just a straight array of
character codes.  All you have to do is read the character codes and use
a Unicode character map in FreeType.  (Though UCS-2 text can have
surrogate character pairs that have to be interpreted specially... see
the Unicode standard for details).

For Unicode text in UTF-8 format, characters are a variable number of
bytes in size.  You can find details on the UTF-8 format, including a
sample C function to read UTF-8 characters from a string, in the Unicode
standard in one of the apendicies.  You can also find details on UTF-8
(but no sample code) in the Internet RFC 2044.  Once you have the
character codes, again, you can just use a Unicode character map.

Off the top of my head, I can't tell you how to get a Unicode character
map in FreeType, but it's a pretty standard operation and I seem to
remember there being an example for it in the FreeType docs.  There are
also lots of people on this list who can probably help you with that.

--Matthew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Allen Lin [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Friday, August 11, 2000 4:33 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: unicode?
> 
> 
> Two questions.
> 
> 1) FreeType2 supports unicode text and UTF8, correct?
> 
> 2) Does FreeType2 have a function which reads in unicode text 
> or UTF8 from a
> file?  If so, how do I access it?
> 
> - Allen H. Lin  (not quite Asok)
>   Programming Intern
>   Quicksilver Software Inc.
>   (949)474-2150 x56
> 
> The views addressed in this e-mail are not representative of 
> Quicksilver
> Software in any way, shape, or form.
>