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

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 03:46 -0400, David Turner wrote:
> > 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 !

Hi David,

I'm not sure if I understand what these lsb/rsb stuff is.  Is there
anything here that cairo/pango should be doing that it's not already?

cheers
behdad


> 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

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

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