[Devel] Loading composite glyphs

[Scott Long]

Greetings everybody.

The composite glyph loading code is quite complex and I've been having
difficulty understanding how exactly a composite glyph is loaded. I can
tell that a stack of subglyphs is being used, but it's hard to see how.
Are the subglyphs collected on a stack and their points merged together
into the final glyph? The last time I saw such looping/switching was
when I was writing an LALR parser for a compilers course. I didn't
understand my own code that well either, when I was done with it. At
least the FreeType code involves only a single stack instead of three :)

I guess the crux of my question is this: if, for example, I've got a
composite glyph which is an "A" with two dots on top of it (I'm assuming
such a glyph is probably composite), and I get the outline of the glyph,
does that outline contain 4 contours (two for the A, one for each dot)
and all the points which make up the glyph as a whole? That is, does the
points array for the outline contain ALL the points for the four
contours?

Now that I've thrown a bunch of questions out there, I'll guiltily
depart.

Thanks,
Scott