Re: Freetype-based text rendering and font discovery

[Michael Goffioul]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 5:38 PM, John W. Eaton<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 23-Jun-2009, Michael Goffioul wrote:
>
> | I'm currently working on text rendering in the OpenGL backend, using
> | freetype. I have a draft working version that contains enough to render
> | tick labels, axe labels and title, as well as basic text objects
> | (90x-rotated, no background, no border, no margin...).
> |
> | But before commiting anything, I'd also like to add basic font discovery
> | mechanism. Up to now, I'm using an hardcoded TTF font that will only
> | work under Windows.
> |
> | I'm thinking about using fontconfig, which I guess is widely spread
> | in UNIX environment. To make it simple in the configure script, I'm
> | thinking about using pkg-config to find out fontconfig compilation flags.
> |
> | Would these added dependencies be acceptable?
>
> It's OK with me for Octave to depend directly on fontconfig.  Should
> it be a hard requirement, or should we still allow the OpenGL graphics
> code to be compiled if fontconfig is not found?

The way I coded it is that when fontconfig is not present,
text rendering will use a default hardcoded font instead.
At the moment, I only added that specific font for Win32
platform, using Verdana font (standard font I guess since
WinXP).

Michael.