Re: [ft-devel] controlling FreeType modules

[Chris Liddell]

On 07/09/12 03:34, Akira TAGOH wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 11:32 PM, Chris Liddell
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I just think that Freetype should remain an engine which takes a font from
> > some source, and uses it to to create outline or bitmap glyphs. I would not
> > like to see Freetype getting sucked into loading fonts by name (even if that
> > was done by punting off the fontconfig), or gaining any kind of layout
> > capabilities.
>
> But it's what one has to be done for CFR. otherwise someone needs to
> write another library to support CFR, which may has a lot of duplicate
> code to FreeType.

I don't see that being the case at all. As Werner mentioned, it could 
better be implemented as a layer over Freetype.

In truth, I'd say that it is closer to fontconfig's purview that 
freetype's - although I'll grant it's still far from a perfect fit even 
for fontconfig, and would be a massive increase in complexity for 
fontconfig (as, in reality, it would be freetype - see below).

If we start down that road, I can see a *lot* of peripheral stuff coming 
out of it: we'd probably end up having to implement some of "font 
matching" heuristics (user asks for "Times,Roman", we're expected to 
know that actually means "TimesNewRoman" or whatever, or worse, trying 
to heuristically match font characteristics for missing font files).

I'm struggling to find real documentation on the Win7 composite font 
thing (I'm being a little careful in my phrasing, I don't want to get 
mixed up with Postscript composite fonts), but I don't really see the 
issue with being passed a font file, and the XML character set 
definitions file, and have the user request freetype use character set 
"X" with the supplied font. Freetype could validate that the character 
set is appropriate for the font (I assume that information is available 
in the XML definition) and assemble a "composed font object" from which 
to actually render glyphs. Basically, much like a Postscript interpreter 
does with CIDFont/CMap composing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole Win7 composite font deal sounds 
to me like a slightly more flexible (and complex) way of storing the 
data we've previously seen in the cmap tables in TTF/OTF fonts. So, 
since freetype already handles cmap tables (allowing the user to select 
between them), this would really just be an extension of that functionality.

Chris