[Freetype] FreeType 2.0.6 is released !!

[David Turner]

Hello,

  FreeType 2.0.6 has just been released to the main FreeType FTP server.
  Since SourceForge is currently under maintenance, you can grab it with
  one of the following methods to get the new packages (sources, demos
  + documentation):

    - download it directly from our main FTP server

    - wait tomorrow and use one or our mirrors

    - use CVS, with the "VER-2-0-6" tag


  There are _tons_ of important bug and reliability fixes, as well as rendering
  improvements for all scalable font drivers (and the auto-hinter). This release
  should be considered a must-have for nearly any system..


  Enjoy :o)

- David Turner


PS:
================================================================================
LATEST CHANGES BETWEEN 2.0.6 and 2.0.5

  I. IMPORTANT BUG FIXES

    - It wasn't possible to load embedded bitmaps when the auto-hinter was
      used.  This is now fixed.

    - The TrueType font driver didn't load some composites properly (the
      sub-glyphs were slightly shifted, and this was only noticeable when
      using monochrome rendering).

    - Various fixes to the auto-hinter.  They merely improve the output of
      sans-serif fonts.  Note that there are still problems with serifed
      fonts and composites (accented characters).

    - All scalable font drivers erroneously returned un-fitted glyph
      advances when hinting was requested.  This created problems for a
      number of layout applications.  This is a very old bug that got
      undetected mainly because most test/demo program perform rounding
      explicitly or implicitly (through the cache).

    - FT_Glyph_To_Bitmap() did erroneously modify the source glyph in
      certain cases.

    - "glnames.py" still contained a bug that made FreeType return invalid
      names for certain glyphs.


    - the library crashed when loading certain Type 1 fonts like "sadn.pfb"
      ("Stalingrad Normal"), which appear to contain pathetic font info
      dictionaries..

    - the TrueType glyph loader is now much more paranoid and checks everything
      when loading a given glyph image. This was necessary to avoid problems
      (crashes and/or memory overwrites) with broken fonts that came from a
      really buggy automatic font converter..


  II. IMPORTANT UPDATES AND NEW FEATURES

    - Important updates to the Mac-specific parts of the library.

    - The caching sub-system has been completely re-designed, and its API
      has evolved (the old one is still supported for backwards
      compatibility).

      The documentation for it is not yet completed, sorry.  For now, you
      are encouraged to continue using the old API.  However, the ftview
      demo program in the ft2demos package has already been updated to use
      the new caching functions.

    - A new charmap cache is provided too.  See FTC_CMapCache().  This is
      useful to perform character code -> glyph index translations quickly,
      without the need for an opened FT_Face.

    - A NEW POSTSCRIPT HINTER module has been added to support native hints
      in the following formats: PostScript Type 1, PostScript CID, and
      CFF/CEF.

      Please test!  Note that the auto-hinter produces better results for a
      number of badly-hinted fonts (mostly auto-generated ones) though.

    - A memory debugger is now part of the standard FreeType sources.  To
      enable it, define FT_DEBUG_MEMORY in <freetype/config/ftoption.h>, and
      recompile the library.

      Additionally, define the _environment_ variable FT_DEBUG_MEMORY and
      run any program using FreeType.  When the library is exited, a summary
      of memory footprints and possible leaks will be displayed.

      This works transparently with _any_ program that uses FreeType. 
      However, you will need a lot of memory to use this (allocated blocks
      are never released to the heap to detect double deletes easily).


  III. MISCELLANEOUS

    - We are aware of subtle differences between the output of FreeType
      versions 1 and 2 when it comes to monochrome TrueType-hinted glyphs. 
      These are most probably due to small differences in the monochrome
      rasterizers and will be worked out in an upcoming release.


    - We have decided to fork the sources in a "stable" branch, and an
      "unstable" one, since FreeType is becoming a critical component of
      many Unix systems.
      
      The next bug-fix releases of the library will be named 2.0.7,
      2.0.8, etc.. while the "2.1" branch will contain a version of the
      sources where we'll start major reworking of the library's internals,
      in order to produce FreeType 2.2.0 (or even 3.0) in a more distant
      future.
      
      We also hope that this scheme will allow much more frequent releases
      than in the past