[GRASS-dev] iconv a required dependency for using Freetype?

[Paul Kelly]

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Paul Kelly wrote:

> Maybe writing it in C, linking it against the Freetype library and using the 
> Freetype API to query information about the font files it finds would be a 
> good idea. Presumably it would be possible to determine if two fonts are 
> identical, also the information about more that one font in each file and 
> perhaps more descriptive names for the font that just the filename would be 
> available. But I don't know for sure; haven't looked at the Freetype API.
I've done that now. See attached for the prototype in case anybody would 
like to try it. What it does is search through all the files in the list 
of directories we gathered (hard-coded in main.c). Rather than checking 
the file extension it examines each file using Freetype functions to see 
if it is a font or not. This should work for font files with no extension 
if they exist. It should also get the multiple fonts in one file OK - 
would be especially interested to see what it comes up with when run on a 
Mac system.

I haven't done anything yet about finding duplicate fonts - I don't have 
any on either the Windows or Linux systems I tested this on. The list is 
sorted first by font type (stroke or freetype) and secondly name. I've 
just gone with a fully descriptive name, including spaces for the names. 
The elegant simplicity of that approach for the GUI font selection box 
seems to work quite well.

The version of the program (called g.mkfontcap for now) attached can write 
a file in either the current freetypecap format, or the proposed new 
fontcap format, which (in order to be Windows-compatible) separates all 
the fields with a vertical bar - and includes the index within each font 
file and the type of font (stroke or freetype) as fields also. Hopefully 
this format should be easily extendible to include PostScript fonts too?

I'm still not very sure at all about the meaning of the encoding field or 
if it should be included, or even if it depends on the fonts in any way at 
all and if there's any way it should be derived from freetype?

If we can decide on a name - maybe g.mkfontcap is all right? - I can 
submit it to CVS for further improvements.

Paul
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