mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Norbert Nemec <address@hidden>]

Am Dienstag, 21. Oktober 2003 18:47 schrieb Joris van der Hoeven:
> Hi *,
>
> I would like to support the common anti-aliased type 3 fonts in TeXmacs.
> After having browsed the web some time, I am starting to wonder what
> is the standard way of doing this.
>
> I had the idea that XFree 4.0 had some support for True Type fonts,
> but when looking more closely, I just found out that this relies on
> FreeType which is a program which is independent of X and which does
> not do the anti-aliasing. Moreover, I found almost no .ttf fonts on
> my hard disk, so this indicates that this is not the standard tool
> which is being used by everybody.

Take a look at http://www.freetype.org - there is no dependency on X11 at all 
(check that again, but I'm pretty sure about it) the library just renders 
type1, truetype and others to bitmaps. By now, it is the standard font 
rendering library under Linux so support is pretty good. It is plain ANSI C, 
no dependencies at all, portable to about anywhere. XRender builds upon 
freetype. TeXmacs should probably use the original library to be really 
portable.

Antialiasing is not part of that library. But as I see it, there is no need 
for it in TeXmacs anyway? Everything is just rendered BW to 600dpi (or 
whatever printer resolution you use) and scaled to screen resolution 
grayscale. So what do you need antialiasing in the font renderer?

Under Linux .ttf is becoming more and more common. Quite a number of quality 
scalable fonts are distributed freely. (e.g. the Vera font family, recently 
donated by Bitstream to te open source community)

> So am I missing something? Since we already do have a mechanism
> for rendering bitmaps in an anti-aliased way, it would not be hard
> for me to support the True Type library. But before doing so,
> I would like to know if there is something more standard,
> so that I will not have to do this stuff over and over all the time.

As I said above: freetype definitely is the standard way


-- 
______________________Norbert Nemec <address@hidden>

    Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
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