Re: [ft-devel] WOFF2 support in GSoC

[Nikhil Ramakrishnan]

Hi all,

First of all, thank you for the great project description, the links
provided are quite helpful!

I read more about the project, and it got me quite interested in the
WOFF2 format and its compression. I have a few observations:

* The structure of WOFF2 is quite similar to WOFF fonts (which is
already supported) except for the fact that the data for the font
tables is compressed in a single data stream and that WOFF2 may
contain a 'collection' of fonts, specified in the Collection
directory. Also, WOFF2 uses Brotli compression.

* The glyf, loca and hmtx tables may have additional transformations
applied before they are compressed, so these tables must be
reconstructed.

* It seems that the Brotli decoder [1] can be (and should be) used to
decompress parts of the file. It is fast, does not seem to have any
external dependencies and the licensing (MIT) should not be an issue.

A few questions:

* Are we looking at an implementation similar to WOFF (synthesize an
SFNT from the WOFF, and load the SFNT)? This will mean no API to read
WOFF2 metadata.

* Although I am comfortable with the API, I have not directly worked
on the FreeType font processing sources. Is it practically possible to
understand it enough to implement this project in the GSoC time frame?

I started reading on this subject recently, so apologies for any
obvious details I missed!

[1] https://github.com/google/brotli/tree/master/c


On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 8:37 AM Alexei Podtelezhnikov
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I have just added another idea for a GSoC project: WOFF2 support. It should 
> be posted on https://www.freetype.org/gsoc.html shortly.
>
> Alexei
> _______________________________________________
> Freetype-devel mailing list
> address@hidden
> https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel



-- 
Nikhil