Re: [Freetype] render greek characters

[Stathis]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > I am trying to render greek text on top of a bitmap.  I use standard
> > arial.ttf of windows2000 (I tried other fonts also), which from what
> > I know contains the greek glyphs.  Unfortunately I can only render
> > latin characters and any greek ones come up as a white square.  I
> > tried setting a lot of different combinations of charmaps/encodings
> > in FT, but still there doesn't seem to be any proper outcome from
> > those changes.
>
>
> Hmm, trying with
>
>   ftview -e unic 20 arial.ttf
>
> from the ft2demos package and moving up to character code 0x384 I can
> see Greek glyphs.  With other words, selecting the Unicode charmap and
> using input codes of 0x384 you get what you want.  Apparently you are
> doing something wrong.

Certainly I am missing something. What I did initially was to hardcode 
the text in greek like char* text = "κειμενο" and set the charmap to 
Unicode. Then I have a function that loops over each of those characters 
and with FT_Load_Char(face, text[index], FT_LOAD_RENDER) I try to 
retrieve the respective glyph. It appears that I have to convert my text 
somehow so the lookup can happen, but I do not know how. I understand 
it's not a freetype question this, but if this is the problem how can I 
convert these characters to Unicode, if they aren't?

> > Right now everything is hardcoded, so there is no possibility for
> > the user to select the font, and also set the script, which seems to
> > be what needs to be done.  Is that the problem?  If so is there a
> > way to do this programmatically?
>
>
> It looks as if you are describing problems with a certain program.
> Which one?

It's a custom win32 application rendering text over bitmaps, nothing 
special. I could do it the windows way, but this hinders portability, so 
I would prefer to use freetype.

>     Werner
>
> PS: Note that in my arial.ttf version (from 2000), kern pairs are not
>     in a `kern' table but in the GPOS table.  The logical consequence
>     is that newer arial.ttf versions have a similar layout.  GPOS is
>     not supported by FreeType directly; you have to use Pango, Qt, or
>     ICU to access it (or you parse the GPOS table directly).

I guess that's something to consider once I get to render something 
useful. I am not very literate with font jargon and text 
formats/conversions, so bare with me. Thanks for your help and feel free 
to point me to any documentation you think can help me figure it out.

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--stathis