Re: [ft] Is freetype the right program for a small embedded printing system?

[Brady Duga]

Sounds like you have a very specific implementation that doesn't need all the 
support of FreeType (or any font engine). Looks like you have 3 embedded 
black-and-white bitmap fonts. You don't say what character set you need to 
support - is this ASCII, Latin-1, Unicode, etc? Anyway, it sounds like you 
might be better off with a custom solution. Just design your glyphs and encode 
them as B&W bitmaps, using your own code to index and print them. You can 
compress them to save space (perhaps run-length encode, which is both simple 
and pretty good at compressing simple B&W images). You may not even need to 
expand them to uncompressed bitmaps. It kind of depends on how you communicate 
with the print head. And if they are monospaced you don't even need to store 
their metrics per-glyph.

--Brady