RE: [Devel] unpatented hinting system

[Graham Asher]

George,

you said

<<<<<<
 if the unpatented hinting
involves the inclusion of TT_RunIns in executables when the full
bytecode interpreter is not enabled, please give me some way of
detecting at run time what kind of byte code interpreter is available.
Currently I depend on the existance of the above function to indicate
this.
>>>>>>

I followed the earlier discussion about this, and I believe the consensus
was that (i) testing for the existence of a function at run-time is not a
great idea because it is not portable, and (ii) FreeType should have a
function that returns a set of flags representing available compile-time
options.

If you need a specific function to tell you what kind of hinting is
available you could add one to FreeType very easily; but if you are using a
pre-compiled library and can't re-build then I see the problem.

The best idea, I think, is for me to add a general capabilities function as
in (ii) above and get approval to commit this to the build. You can then
find out if hinting is compiled, and, if so, whether unpatented hinting is
forced.

Best regards,

Graham Asher