Re: [ft-devel] How to determine if patented hinting is enabled?

[Huw D M Davies]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 05:16:47PM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
> > I'm sure that this has come up before, but I can't find an answer.
> > Is there a way to determine, at runtime, whether the bytecode hinter
> > has been enabled?
> 
> No.
> 
> > I can do this with: FT_DRIVER_HAS_HINTER(FT_Get_Module("truetype"))
> > but I have to include freetype/internal/ftobjs.h to do so, which
> > suggests to me that this isn't something I should rely on.  Is there
> > a better way?
> 
> No.
> 
> > The reason that this would be useful, is that I'd like to respect
> > the gasp table and turn off antialiasing for certain pixel size.
> > However, I only want to do so when we have proper hinting enabled.
> > Non-antialiased, unhinted glyphs just look too ugly.
> 
> In the CVS I've added a new face flag, FT_FACE_FLAG_HINTER, which is
> set if a native hinting engine is available.  Please test, and thanks
> for the suggestion.

Sorry it's taken so long to get back to you.

While this face flag is useful it's not quite what I need (for Wine).
I need to be able to tell whether the bytecode hinter is enabled
before loading a font (I could find a random font and load it during
initialization but that's very ugly).  What I really need is a way to
retrieve the module flags from a FT_Module.  I can do this in couple
of ways either by exposing the FT_ModuleRec structure in ftmodapi.h or
by adding a function like:

FT_Error FT_Module_Get_Flags(FT_Module mod, FT_ULong *flags);
that returns the module flags for a given module.

I'm happy to write a patch for either, which would you prefer or do
you have another suggestion?

Many thanks,
Huw.