Re: autokerning (was [ft-devel] New FreeType proofing tool: ftdiff)

[David Turner]

> My question again. Why is it better to pass lsb/rsb knowledge to higher
> level than to teach freetype to render a single word and provide an
> interface for that?

There are several reasons not to do that in FreeType:

- the font engine doesn't do caching, so performance is going to suck
- sophisticated text layout requires precise knowledge of these details anyway
- what about all sophisticated effects like hollowing, texturing, embossing
  and other stuff like that.

So in short, FreeType is neither a text layout or graphics library, and 
shouldn't
try to do this itself.

> Do we really need to replicate the same code in every application?
> 
In every library that does its own text layout, yes !

An alternative would be to hack FT_Get_Kerning to return "adjusted" values, but
this would require implementing a rather complicated caching scheme within the
engine if we don't want performance to suck horribly. Moreover, this is likely
to break some libraries...

- David