Re: [Devel] Equivalent of ftstrtto.c and apirefx.txt for FreeType2 please.

[Werner LEMBERG]

> My colleagues Yogesh Ketkar and Keyur Shroff had used the OpenType
> capabilities of FreeType 1.4 to create IndiX.  I too had used
> FreeType 1.4 for printing text and html files containing Devanagari
> text using OpenType fonts.  Now I am investigating switchover to
> FreeType2.

This won't be possible yet.  Currently, OpenType tables are *not*
supported in FreeType 2 for two reasons:

  . We've decided that OpenType support must be implemented one level
    higher than FreeType, since FreeType is basically a rendering
    engine which converts an outline to a bitmap.

  . Lack of time :-(

> I have downloaded  freetype-2.1.4 and  ft2demos-2.1.4.
> >From the developers CVS I have checked out ft2demos and ftlayout.

The ftlayout module is dead.  src/otlayout in FreeType 2 contains some
ideas how OpenType tables can be parsed and checked for validity.  It
doesn't work (yet).

> It appears that OpenType layout (v1.3) is fully supported by
> FreeType2.

How did you get this impression?  We support OpenType fonts for
rendering, but the layout specific tables (GSUB, GPOS, JUST, GDEF)
are completely ignored.

We would be glad if someone (you?) can work on OpenType support,
making the stuff in src/otlayout actually work together with writing
the high-level API equivalent to the FreeType 1 functions
TT_GSUB/GPOS_Apply_String, either as a new library on top of FT2 or as
a module for FT2.  Discussion is highly welcome.

BTW, it would be nice if any bugs your team has found in FT1's
OpenType code could be incorporated back into the FT1 distribution
(I'm quite sure that there still are some...).

Owen, I ask you the same :-)


    Werner