[ft-devel] Unix Font Performance/Rendering patches available

[David Turner]

Hello everyone,

I'm proud to announce a new page, containing patches for various libraries
using FreeType, in order to improve performance and/or rendering quality
on Unix systems. You'll find it at:

http://turnerdavid.neuf.fr/freetype/patches/font-patches.html

you'll find two patches at the moment, one speeds up fontconfig cache
regeneration speed in important ways for systems that have not upgraded
to FreeType 2.2

the other one implements ClearType-like LCD filtering, and fixes
Cairo/libXft
to enable light-hinted subpixel rendering. This feature might ultimately be
implemented within FreeType, but I'm still too unsure of the patent
situation
regarding this technology to do that now.

I'm currently using light-hinted subpixel rendered text on my desktop,
and it's
rather delicous :-)


More patches are in the work, but I prefer not to announce anything.

You'll also notice that I recently commited a huge set of optimizations
to the
FreeType CVS that speeds up TrueType glyph loading (with hinting) by 25% on
x86 Linux. This has the effect of further reducing fontconfig's cache
regeneration,
which runs in 8.5 seconds, instead of 20.5 (I added fonts since my last
benchmark).

Enjoy,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)


PS: I've sent my patch to the fontconfig mailing list, but it seems to
have never
      reached them. I also tried three times to join the list, but this
has never worked.
      Could someone do something about it ? Keith Packard, are you reading ?