Re: [Devel] FreeType gzip support completed

[Vadim Plessky]

Hello,

On Friday 01 November 2002 1:28 am, David Turner wrote:
|  Hello,
|
|     I'm happy to announce that FreeType's support for gzip-compressed
|     streams is now completed. Currently, this is visible in two ways:
|
|      - the file <freetype/ftgzip.h> (or FT_GZIP_H) provides a new API,
|        named "FT_Stream_OpenGzip" that can be used to "embed" an
|        existing compressed gzip stream.
|
|        it can be called manually by the application when needed.
|        please refer to the documentation comment in the public
|        header.

Great!  Do you plan to add support for bzip2, too?
bzip2 has much better compression
Compare typical .tar.gz and .tar.bz2, I have sen differences in about 1MB (on 
15MB file) when archieving my mail folder.

|
|      - the PCF driver was modified to automatically detect
|        gzip-compressed streams when it wasn't possible to "read"
|        the PCF header correctly. This is automatic and transparent,
|        and applications don't need to do anything special to
|        benefit from it.
|
|     It is possible to change FreeType to transparently support
|     gzipped-compressed fonts of any format, but I've not followed this
|     route for now, since I don't want to encourage people to make
|     stupid choices (e.g. support gzip-compressed TrueType/Type 1 fonts
|     for example)

Zipped (gzipped, bzipped) SVG fonts would be nice, though.
(named as '.svgz' when exported from Adobe Illustrator)

BTW:  does someone has experience with SVG fonts?
I think Leonrad mentioned once that SVG fonts are PS Type2 fonts (Adobe CFF 
format).
I am not sure, though, how to add support for them into FreeType.

But it sems there is a good progress on SVG front (KSVG, librsvg2, Sodipodi, 
Karbon14), so I think we woul dneed support for SVG-embedded fonts Really 
Soon.

|
|     The implementation is pretty basic (it simply uses a small buffer,
|     and resets the compression completely as soon as a backwards seek
|     is needed). As basic as it seems, it works extremely well and
|     with little memory footprint.
|
|     The new code is in "src/gzip/ftgzip.c". It is a complete rewrite
|     that doesn't contain a single line from Juliusz's previous patch,
|     but thanks to him for being a strong inspiration for the new
|     code :-)
|
|     By the way, I have copied some of the sources of zlib in order
|     to not have nasty library dependency issues for program linking
|     with FreeType. Even if this is easy to solve on Unix, this can
|     be a hell on Windows and many other platforms.
|
|     As a consequence, the new "ftgzip" component is about 12-16 Kb
|     of ix86 code. It is of course disabled with a new configuration
|     macro named FT_CONFIG_OPTION_USE_ZLIB
|
|     Enjoy, and please report any problems :-)
|
|  - David Turner
|  - The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)
|  _______________________________________________
|  Devel mailing list
|  address@hidden
|  http://www.freetype.org/mailman/listinfo/devel

-- 

Vadim Plessky
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