[ft-devel] Porting to D

[Trevor Parscal]

My name is Trevor Parscal. I am new to the FreeType community, so I am 
unsure how many of my questions will get answered, but you can't win if you 
don't enter so here it is...

I am porting the very annoyingly complex FreeType headers to the D 
programming language (www.digitalmars.com) to use in an cross platform 
OpenGL application framework I am writing, Terra 
(www.dsource.org/projects/terra)

So anyways, I have spent countless hours working on converting the C header 
files to D import modules, which is always tedious, but I think I got myself 
in over my head at first on this one.

After getting everything converted, I started debugging, and it was so 
overwhelming that I just started over and made and attempt to impliment the 
bare minimum functions and defintions needed to render a TrueType font.

This was a little more successfull, but I ran into the problem that my first 
question is all about.

Nowhere in the FreeType headers or source was there any actual definition of 
these types, only refrences to to them to typedef others.

FT_Incremental
FT_Size_Internal
FT_Raster
FT_ClassRec

This confused me, since the exact same source and headers compiled a lib for 
my in MSVC.NET... Not sure how a type can be defined out of thin air like 
that, so I assume there is a logical explaination...

My next question is if there is any advice that anyone could give me on 
porting these headers. Maybe there is a wealth of knowledge out there that 
someone who ported them to another language before could pour out to me.

And finally, I am a web developer and all, so I could help out maybe if you 
guys need anything web-site/server related. I offer my services for free, 
you know, for the good of the project.

Despite my dissapointment with the sheer complexity of the header files, I 
do love the quality of the rendering, so don't take my criticism as an 
insult. I imagine everyone can see the need for simplification, or maybe 
that's just my view.. ?

Well, I hope soemone can help me figure this out. Great project, much 
apprication for the hard work I know it probably took to make FreeType.

Thanks,
Trevor Parscal