[Devel] FreeType on EPOC

[Graham . Asher]

The EPOC port of FreeType has existed since 1998 but has only just made it
on to a released version of EPOC: version 6.0, which is currently used only
on the new Nokia 9210 smartphone, but will soon be on many more products
using the Symbian platform. Symbian has licensed the appropriate patents
from Apple and so can make use of the hinting information.

Because the port was done a long time ago it uses FreeType 1.1 and supports
TrueType only. Glyphs are cached, so the actual speed of display is not
dependent on the rasterization speed.

The rasterizer is a plug-in DLL and the architecture can support multiple
simultaneous rasterizers handling different font formats.

Actually, the existence of an EPOC FreeType port has been public for some
time - I announced it in Amsterdam in March 2000, at the Unicode Conference
- but I thought it a good idea not to shout about this until Symbian had a
product out that used it.

Here's a quote from my conference paper, which you can read on the web if
you like (http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc16/c16/paper.html):

there is now a plug-in system for rasterizers so that pretty much any font
format can be supported. The most important of the standard font formats is
TrueType, and we support it by means of a rasterizer based on the excellent
open source FreeType library

Graham Asher
Symbian Ltd.



                                                                                
                                   
                    "Jesper                                                     
                                   
                    Zuschlag"            To:     address@hidden                 
                         
                    <address@hidden        cc:                                  
                                     
                    lag.dk>              Subject:     Re: [Devel] I achieved 
success porting FreeType2 into OUR    
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                    04/12/00                                                    
                                   
                    13:48                                                       
                                   
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>
>I'd like to echo David's comments. Rasterization using FreeType runs at

>over 50 characters a second on an 18 MHz ARM processor; so something must

>be wrong.
>
>Graham Asher
>Symbian Ltd.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Devel mailing list
>address@hidden
>http://www.freetype.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
>
>

OK, so you have a EPOC port of FreeType! When will
you release it? I have thought about doing such a
port, but now I do not bother.

Jesper Zuschlag