On 16/03/2008 7:30 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote: > On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote: > >> Simon Urbanek wrote: >>> On Mar 15, 2008, at 1:30 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote: >>> >>> >>>> I'm trying to add FreeType support to rgl. I see that there are >>>> versions that ship with OSX, and also versions on DarwinPorts and >>>> fink. >>>> What would be the recommended advice to users on this, and what would >>>> a configure script need in order to find FreeType? >>>> >>>> >>> FreeType is a bit of a pain (I'll elaborate on that below). For CRAN >>> binaries of packages that use FreeType we use a static build instead >>> of the system one because those are too old. From a package's point of >>> view it's easy, though, because you only have to ask pkgconfig or >>> freetype-config. I wouldn't bother doing anything Mac-specific, >>> because both Tiger and Leopard have freetype-config, but their >>> versions are too old or buggy to bother. >>> >>> >>> >>>> On Linux, looking for freetype-config works, but that's not working >>>> on my OSX 10.4 laptop. >>>> >>> It should - do you have X11 on your PATH? >>> >>> >>> >>>> Would it work in Leopard out of the box, or does a user need to >>>> install FreeType explicitly? >>>> >>>> >>> Sort of - X11 in Leopard is broken out of the box, so you have to fix >>> that first, but once you do, it works. Both Tiger and Leopard come >>> with FreeType. >>> >>> The real problem is that FreeType (even the last release) is somewhat >>> broken on OS X. It doesn't support system fonts properly. The CVS >>> version is a bit better, but still has a bug that causes font styles >>> to be mixed up. In addition, it is incompatible with the one shipped >>> in the OS. But anyhow, I don't think you should worry about all this >>> as a package maintainer - I'll have to sort those things out anyway >>> now that we use FreeType in R :). > >> Thanks, it was the lack of X11 in the path that was the problem for >> detection, but now I'm seeing some bad glyphs. >> I'm using FTGL as a wrapper for Freetype, so the problem might be there, >> or it might be the broken Freetype. > > I've seen that, and in all cases it was to do with which font freetype was > told to use. > > You could try to make sure that the Apple TrueType fonts (what Simon is > calling 'system fonts') are used -- it seems that almost everything else > gets used incorrectly on MacOS. I'm not sure FTGL has support for those > -- its demo hardcodes paths to .ttf fonts, for MacOS in a user area. > > Finding suitable fonts is probably also a concern on Linux and other > Unix-alikes. There are some free ttf fonts available that you could ship: > they are not as nice as the Apple ones, but they would provide a good > platform-independent default. (E.g. Liberation, mentioned in > R-admin.texi.) If you want a symbol font, you are going to be out of luck > -- the only symbol fonts I know of are the Apple and Windows ones, and > freetype does not use the Windows one correctly (or at least, no > freetype-based program I have tried does, and it seems to do with the > encoding).
I've taken three from the Amaya project (FreeMono, FreeSans, and FreeSerif). They also have some symbol fonts ESSTIX*, with a non-GPL compatible license; I haven't seen how good they are. Amaya also has bold, italic and bold-italic versions of the basic fonts, but I've only taken the regular ones, to avoid a huge increase in the rgl file size. I see the same problem using /System/Library/Fonts/times.dfont. It looks as though FTGL or FreeType is building a bitmap, then misapplies the dimensions: some of the characters are fine, others end up really slanted (sometimes wrapped) within a rectangular box. Duncan Murdoch _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
