Re: Getting Involved With Freetype

[James Hu]

Hi,

I do have some past experience with LaTeX, but entirely from a user perspective - I have no experience with LaTeX fonts or underlying rendering techniques.

I did some research and found a blog post by Parth about the status of his GSoC project. It seems that Parth finished the TFM, PK, and GK font rendering, but was unable to complete the VFLib portion. Since the VFLib portion of the project was marked as difficult, I don't believe I am ready to tackle that challenge yet. In the meantime, I've been reading through the rest of the FreeType docs on font rendering/hinting and have become interested in the auto-hinter project. I'll be sure to follow up if I believe the project is suitable for me. 

Sincerely,

James Hu

On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 3:14 PM Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org> wrote:

Sorry for the late response.

> Over the past few days I was successfully able to clone/make both
> the freetype and freetype-demo libraries.  I've also read through
> the documentation on the site and feel I have a rudimentary
> understanding of fonts, glyphs, and other font rendering concepts.
> However, I don't feel ready to tackle any of the issues linked here.
> I do have experience with C, but it was relatively basic compared to
> what I've been looking at in the freetype repo.  In other words, I
> haven't worked with codebases this large or complex.  Would this
> present a major problem if I want to get involved with FreeType?  In
> other words, is there room for learning more about C and font
> rendering as I go?

This is hard to say.  A good foundation in writing C code is probably
a necessity.  On the other hand, I consider improving your knowledge
in font rendering as part of the project.

> Currently, I am most interested in the VFLib.

Good.  Do you have any experience with (classical) TeX or LaTeX?

> From my understanding, TFM stores font information, while the actual
> glyphs are stored in PK/GF as bitmaps/raster formats.

Correct.

> So is the overall goal of the VFLib project then to add TFM and
> PK/GF rendering capability directly into FreeType? (Ideally without
> using VFLib as a dependency)

Yes.  FreeType would load PK or GF fonts, and the TFM data would be
'attached', similar to the already existing mechanism to attach
AFM/PFM files to Type 1 fonts.

> In addition, is it possible to check if the original GSOC 2018
> contributor, Parth Wazurkar, is still following the mailing list (it
> seems that email addresses are hidden on the mailing list)?

I don't think so; otherwise he would probably have already answered.

> If not, is there an alternate way to get into contact with them?

Try <parthwazurkar@gmail.com>.


    Werner