Re: D-Type or FreeType?

[Nathan Hurst]

On Sun, 5 Nov 2000, Bart De Lathouwer wrote:

> Questions:
> * Is anyone thinking on implementing outlines in FreeType.

Ok, thinking about outlines, how would we do it?  one approach would be to
stroke the outline, the other would be to inset the outline and draw the
difference.  I don't think it is possible in either case to generate a
glyph that corresponds to the outline only(as there are usually no beziers
that correspond to a parallel offset of another bezier), so we have to do
the outlining 'on the fly' or create glyphs made up of lots of line
segments.

Probably the easiest method would be to compute the parallel offsets of
the glyph translated to lines.  There is code in gnome-canvas that does
this.  I think the operation in question is called minkowski product and
it is quite efficient for tracing a polygon with an arbitrary convex
polygon, and quite inefficient for tracing a polygon with any concave
polygon.

njh