[Devel] FT_Outline_Copy

[Scott Long]

It took me a while to track down a problem this morning, which turned 
out to be my incorrect use of FT_Outline_Copy(). I didn't notice the 
section in the manual stating that n_contours and n_points have to 
already match in order for the copy to take place.

I don't intend to complain, but what's the point in having this 
function if I have to do 50% of the work myself? If I've got to go to 
the trouble of setting n_contours and n_points, and then allocating 
the arrays myself, why not simply finish the job and do the memcpy() 
myself also?

The best reason I can think of is that Freetype can't know who "owns" 
the points and tags arrays beforehand, and therefore doesn't know 
whether it should free them, or allocate new ones. What that the 
original thinking?

I don't think it would be too terrible if there was another function, 
that allocated the arrays itself, and had a little note in the 
documentation reminding the user that he is responsible for freeing 
those arrays when finished with them. Perhaps in this function it 
would also be possible to make the argument order (dst, src) instead 
of (src, dst), which is another thing I found confusing (considering 
all the other copy functions e.g. memcpy, strcpy, a = b, etc).

Regards,

Scott Long
SwiftView, Inc. http://www.swiftview.com