Re: [ft-devel] About customization of freetype for BDF

[David Turner]

Hi Werner,


>      src/raster/raster.c     -- monochrome rasterizer
>
>  
This one is not needed for BDF, which isn't a vector format.

>  optional:
>      src/cache/ftcache.c     -- cache sub-system (in beta)
>      src/gzip/ftgzip.c       -- support for compressed fonts (.gz)
>      src/lzw/ftlzw.c         -- support for compressed fonts (.Z)
>
>  
By the way, the BDF driver starts by allocating a 64 Kb buffer before 
reading a single
byte from the font file, and the LZW reader allocates up-front a 400Kb 
buffer for
decompression purposes (yes, you've read that correctly !!). Some day, 
I'm going
to rewrite this crap...

Dont' know if this is going to fly for embedded systems :-)

For small footprint environments, I'd recommend using a different font 
format.
BDF font files are very large, take a lot of time to parse, and the 
current driver
uses gobs of memory to load the font file.

You'd better try PCF or WinFNT instead if all you need is a bitmap font 
format.
It will be much much lighter for your CPU and RAM.

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)