Re: [ft-devel] FreeType Engine

[Werner LEMBERG]

> 1- What compiler(s) would you say FreeType is compatible with?  We
>    are flexible enough to change compilers.

FreeType is written in ANSI C, so basically all compilers should work.
The problem is with compilers which are less than ANSI C...

> 2- Aside from scaling fonts at run time, what other capabilities
>    FreeType has?

None :-)  FreeType's job is to render a glyph, nothing more.

> 3- Does the library have API calls to display texts, or draw
>    graphical components, such as lines, boxes, filled boxes, etc?

No.  You need a higher-level library to do that because display of
text strings can get extremely convoluted as soon as OpenType features
are used.  Look at Pango, Qt, or ICU.

> 4- Would the library work on any True Type Font?

Essentially, yes.

> 5- What are the limits of how small or large the fonts can be scaled
>    to?

How large... Never tested that actually due to lack of memory :-) Tell
me what you need and I tell you whether it works.

How small... This depends on the font.  However, any scalable font
becomes illegible below 6ppem (pixels per EM) normally.

> 6- What is the cost of getting the library?

It's unclear to me what you mean.  In case you mean money: FreeType is
freely available.

> 7- Is there a demo you can share, or setup a meeting to see the
>    capabilities of FreeType, or give us a temporary version of the
>    library to play with?

FreeType comes with a bundle of demo programs, like ftview, which
should compile on all major platforms.  The latest tarballs are

  http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.4.8.tar.gz
  http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-doc-2.4.8.tar.gz
  http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ft2demos-2.4.8.tar.gz

For compilation on Windows (using non-GNU tools), however, you need
zipped archives which have CR/LF line endings:

  http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ft248.zip
  http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ftdoc248.zip
  http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ftdmo248.zip

Note that we don't develop on Windows; this means that some project
files might be out of date.

BTW, if you need to see real-life usage of FreeType on ARM and similar
chips, simply look at your favourite smartphone: Almost all of them
use FreeType for rendering fonts, in particular everything using
Android or iOS.


    Werner