Re: Merging TTF files? [FreeType]

[Werner LEMBERG]

> In particular, Yudit uses TrueType fonts directly, it doesn't use a
> TrueType/X11 server and I'm not proposing thar.  Mr. Sinai says in
> his documentation that he wanted Yudit to be independent of the
> machine's "locale" setting, so he accesses the font files directly.
> I'm actually not even sure it uses the X11 font server (it may
> access the X11 fonts directly -- I don't really know how to tell the
> difference, as my understanding of this subject is weak).

Accessing the X11 font files directly is not always possible -- it may
be a remote font.

> There's also something called "vflib" which is supposed to serve a
> variety of different kinds of fonts.  It's targeted at Japanese
> users, though, and may be too specialized.

VFlib will integrate FreeType 2 soon.

> Omega is somewhat promising.

The very problem is that OpenType fonts are too intelligent for
Omega.  Maybe someone will write programs to convert OpenType layout
tables into Omega Translation Processes (OTPs).

> Regarding FTL -- it would be really nice if it "looked like"
> FreeType to the application -- then you wouldn't have to recompile
> the application in order to use it.

The idea of FTL is that you send a string of characters for a given
script/language with a set of features, and receive an array of glyph
indices together with vertical and horizontal offsets (plus a lot of
other important data).  Then, you'll forward the glyph indices to
FreeType for rendering.

With other words, FTL will be independent from FreeType -- it is
another DLL, so to say.  Compare this to Microsoft's Uniscribe library
and OTL.


    Werner