No Subject

  - glyph caching (outlines and/or maps)
  - text rendering
  - justification, kerning
  - font mapping
  - rotated/slanted text

> 
> > Freetype uses TTF specific data formats, which were created long ago, when
> > computers were slow (TTF fonts were usable on 286 too), but are of little
> > interest to average programmer. For GNOME I find doubles, ArtPoints,
> > ArtBpaths and GdkPoints to be more convenient, than 16.16, 2.14 and 26.6
> > floats. The former can be used directly in real situations, the latter
> > should be converted by hand by every program.
> 
> Yes, the high level interface should be doubles, and ArtPoints etc.  But
> the truetype stuff is done the way it is because it has to work on
> non-floating point systems(this includes the netwinder).  Considering that
> most of font rendering consists of addition, dividing by two and
> conversion to integers, I think using integers at this level is
> worthwhile(don't forget how costly a float->int is on intel, when you do
> something like that for every char, for every pixel, it is worth doing it 
> the fast way).

Hmmm... this is all why we call these fonts and not image sets. Being font
means, that usually every glyph is used more than once, and is thus
usually cached in efficent way. So there is usually no need doing
extensive float->int for every pixel, but only for every glyph.

And don't forget - in free software world easier API usually results in
more and better quality programs. You can do all, you can do with GNOME,
using plain X - but nobody does. Programmers are eager to give up some of
their coding freedom in exchange of clean and high level API.

> > Also, at least at moment, gnome-font library should deal with both type1
> > and TTF fonts, giving common, higher-level API for handling these.
> 
> Freetype does TTF, Type1 and did, and will have OpenType support.  The
> only other format I can think of worth supporting would be Metafont, and
> I'm sure it would be fairly easy to add Metafont into the existing
> Freetype library.

Agree.
Freetype can well be the backend of gnome font engine, but alone it is not
sufficent.

Regards,
Lauris