Re: [Devel] Java port of FreeType

[David Turner]

Hi again John,

> > Can you directly use the C files (compiled as a Java library), or do
> > you plan to rewrite everying in Java?  The latter is probably quite
> > time consuming, given that FreeType 2 sometimes changes radically...
> 
> I want to port all the source files to Java. Does Freetype 2 change a lot?
>
More or less. I intend to make some internal changes to the structure of
modules before the 2.1 release. That's in order to both fix certain important
bugs (embedded bitmaps cannot be loaded when the auto-hinter is working) as
well as simplify certain internal operations (I really can't describe these
here).

It's not a drastic change in functionality however. What you should really
be interested in is the TrueType bytecode interpreter, the Type1 and CFF/Type2
parsers and charstring decoders, some table loaders, etc.. and these hardly
change a lot..

Expect some big changes in the auto-hinter, and the upcoming Postscript hinter
though, so don't start by porting these :-)

these can probably be rewritten more simply with Java library containers
and features, instead of trying to copy the behaviour of FreeType's C code.

Also, you probably don't need "loadable" modules, custom memory allocators,
etc..

 
Cheers,

- David