[GSoC 2022] Idea on Project "Improve FreeType demo programs"

[Charlie Jiang]

Hi all,

I'm Charlie Jiang, a first-year undergrad student studying Computer Science. I'm interested in contributing to the project "Improve FreeType demo programs". Therefore, I downloaded and built the project, and then play around with it for a while. Here's my current progress and some points that hopefully could be clarified.

1. My main workspace is running Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2019. Therefore the binaries are built on that, using mesonbuild. However, I'm facing great difficulty building one certain dependency librsvg on Windows + MSVC. It has several more dependencies. Although I managed to get most from conan build, Gdk-Pixbuf is still failing due to a link error in glib (maybe glib recipe on conan is also problematic, more testing needed).
   Therefore, on Windows, I manually edited the build.meson of freetype-demos, dropping the librsvg dependency and removing the HAVE_LIBRSVG switch. I wonder about the consequence of doing this.
2. I've managed to build the project on Ubuntu 21.10 with mesonbuild, and all dependencies are pulled from package manager.
3. The existing ftinspect program is compiling with some warning (deprecated functions).
   I noticed two build systems are maintained for ftinspect (meson and qmake) - is it desired?
   The grid size is definite, so the character size may exceed the grid size.
   Some convenience operations are missing in the ftinspect program (no drag-drop file open, no mouse wheel zoom etc.).
   Despite all of that, it's functioning normally.
4. I've played around with ftgrid and ftview, but not all features of them.
   They directly crash when I press "?" if an IME is enabled (e.g. MS Pinyin Input Method).
   Some keys are not working on Windows (notably arrow keys, maybe related to console-attachment problems)
   The keyboard-based control is not so straightforward (at least for Windows users), and moving towards a fully Qt-based GUI could certainly relieve this. However, I noticed some automation functionalities are present (-k option, and p stroke). Should I consider them in ftinspect project?
   
5. There're other tools besides ftgrid and ftview (ftbench, ftchkwd, ftdiff ...). Should I include all of them in ftinspect as well?
6. I'm not familiar with text rendering and font processing, therefore I'm refering to FreeType documentations and other online materials. Are those skills considered as prerequisites before I submit my proposal?
   
7. The proposal submitting has already begun. Am I too late to begin a proposal?

Looking forward to your reply.

Thanks and cheers,
Charlie Jiang