Re: [ft] gdi hack with freetype

[David Turner]

It's a superb hack to use FreeType as *the* font rasterizer within a Windows 
system.
I must say I'm seriously impressed by it, it even supports sub-pixel rendering, 
using
either a statically or dynamically linked FreeType library, and a few other 
things. if you go
to the following pages, you should be able to download the "gdi0387.zip" file 
containing
the source code for it, as well as some DLLs and executables to install it on 
your
system.

  http://free.flop.jp/gdi++/

However, looking at the source code, I see some files liberally taken from 
Microsoft's
C runtime sources (e.g. path handling routines). In other words, I don't know 
if it's
legal to distribute these sources or the binaries generated from them.

Apparently, this works by patching the in-memory shared copies of various 
system DLLs
(e.g. GID32.DLL) so that text-related entry-points are redirected to GDI++.DLL, 
which comes
with the package. It's a pretty agressive technique, I wonder if an anti-virus 
program
wouldn't catch these and prevent these operations.

I must say that I'm pretty cautious and would *not* install this package's 
binaries without
recompiling them from the sources. The potential for abuse is huge. From what 
I've read,
the sources seem clean from any malvolence, but I can't guarantee this at the 
moment.

I also wonder if this is a way to implement ClearType-like rendering in Windows 
2000,
that would be awesome.

I don't read Japanese but it seems GDI++ originates from the following web page:

http://drwatson.nobody.jp/gdi++/

Kudos to the developers. I don't know exactly what we can do to help them here,
but this seems pretty impressive.

Regards,

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


On Mon, 25 Dec 2006 12:07:21 +0100 (CET), "Werner LEMBERG" <address@hidden> 
said:
> 
> > improve CJK font rendering quality on Windows for alphabet only
> > people, clear type has enough quality, but not for CJK.
> > 
> > ScreenShot
> > http://free.flop.jp/gdi++/src/gdi0368.png
> > using freetype 2.2.2(CVS)
> 
> Hmm, I don't understand what you want to say with your message.
> Please rephrase in more detail.
> 
> 
>     Werner
> 
> 
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