Re: [Devel] Ready for 2.0.8

[Keith Packard]

Around 11 o'clock on Feb 8, David Turner wrote:

>  A - I'd prefer having a "FT_Get_First_Char" function, instead of
>      calling FT_Get_Next_Char(0) to retrieve the first character
>      code in a charmap..

There is a simple canonical sequence of code to retrieve the first 
character:

        if (FT_Get_Char_Index (0))
                first_char = 0;
        else
                first_char = FT_Get_Next_Char(0);

I didn't add this as a function inside FreeType as it seemed "too simple".
However, it is a programmer trap of sorts.

>   B - I'd prefer that the "FT_Get_First_Char" and "FT_Get_Next_Char"
>       functions be able to return the glyph index corresponding to
>       the character code as well, like:

Why is this useful?  You can simply call FT_Get_Char_Index on the return 
value.

> That's why I'd prefer to release 2.0.8 right now without the additional
> API, even if this means we're going to release 2.0.9 a few days after
> that. I simply value critical bug-fixes at higher priorities than
> additional features for now..

That's reasonable; we clearly need a bit more discussion on precisely
how the API should work, and whether small changes would make significant 
improvements in what other applications could do with this.  

As you know, my only intent was to be able to rapidly walk the encoding
table to generate an accurate mapping of mapped values.  This API is
sufficient for that work; I've reduced a 10 minute activity to about 2 
seconds.

Does anyone know of other uses for this particular kind of functionality?

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        Compaq Cambridge Research Lab