Re: [ft-devel] FreeType Engine
1- What compiler(s) would you say FreeType is compatible with? We are flexible enough to change compilers. FreeType is written in ANSI C, so basically all compilers should work. The problem is with compilers which are less than ANSI C... 2- Aside from scaling fonts at run time, what other capabilities FreeType has? None :-) FreeType's job is to render a glyph, nothing more. 3- Does the library have API calls to display texts, or draw graphical components, such as lines, boxes, filled boxes, etc? No. You need a higher-level library to do that because display of text strings can get extremely convoluted as soon as OpenType features are used. Look at Pango, Qt, or ICU. 4- Would the library work on any True Type Font? Essentially, yes. 5- What are the limits of how small or large the fonts can be scaled to? How large... Never tested that actually due to lack of memory :-) Tell me what you need and I tell you whether it works. How small... This depends on the font. However, any scalable font becomes illegible below 6ppem (pixels per EM) normally. 6- What is the cost of getting the library? It's unclear to me what you mean. In case you mean money: FreeType is freely available. 7- Is there a demo you can share, or setup a meeting to see the capabilities of FreeType, or give us a temporary version of the library to play with? FreeType comes with a bundle of demo programs, like ftview, which should compile on all major platforms. The latest tarballs are http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.4.8.tar.gz http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-doc-2.4.8.tar.gz http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ft2demos-2.4.8.tar.gz For compilation on Windows (using non-GNU tools), however, you need zipped archives which have CR/LF line endings: http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ft248.zip http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ftdoc248.zip http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ftdmo248.zip Note that we don't develop on Windows; this means that some project files might be out of date. BTW, if you need to see real-life usage of FreeType on ARM and similar chips, simply look at your favourite smartphone: Almost all of them use FreeType for rendering fonts, in particular everything using Android or iOS. Werner ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] FreeType Engine
Hello Thank you for your email and quick response. I certainly am interested, and have a couple of more questions. 1- What compiler(s) would you say FreeType is compatible with? We are flexible enough to change compilers. 2- Aside from scaling fonts at run time, what other capabilities FreeType has? 3- Does the library have API calls to display texts, or draw graphical components, such as lines, boxes, filled boxes, etc? 4- Would the library work on any True Type Font? 5- What are the limits of how small or large the fonts can be scaled to? 6- What is the cost of getting the library? 7- Is there a demo you can share, or setup a meeting to see the capabilities of FreeType, or give us a temporary version of the library to play with? Thank you so much for your time and considerations. Mano -Original Message- From: Werner LEMBERG [mailto:w...@gnu.org] Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 9:28 PM To: Mano Goharla'ee Cc: freetype-devel@nongnu.org Subject: Re: [ft-devel] FreeType Engine We are developing a medical device using an ARM based architecture in an embedded environment. We are using IAR compiler with Micrium RTOS. The device has a touch screen color LCD display (TFT), and requires many different fonts and font sizes for buttons labels, menus, etc. Can we use the FreeType engine in such an environment? We would like to avoid keeping tens of different font tables (bitmaps). It would be nice to have a single font which gets scaled correctly to other sizes. Yes, FreeType has been specifically developed to work in memory-tight environments. Due to its modularity, you can strip off all components you don't need, making its footprint very small. The library is known to work on ARM, however, I don't know whether it works out of the box with your compiler and OS. Patches are highly welcomed :-) Werner ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
[ft-devel] FreeType Engine
Hello, We are developing a medical device using an ARM based architecture in an embedded environment. We are using IAR compiler with Micrium RTOS. The device has a touch screen color LCD display (TFT), and requires many different fonts and font sizes for buttons labels, menus, etc. Can we use the FreeType engine in such an environment? We would like to avoid keeping tens of different font tables (bitmaps). It would be nice to have a single font which gets scaled correctly to other sizes. Please advise, Thanks Man Goharlaee Manager software Development GluMetrics Inc. ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] FreeType Engine
We are developing a medical device using an ARM based architecture in an embedded environment. We are using IAR compiler with Micrium RTOS. The device has a touch screen color LCD display (TFT), and requires many different fonts and font sizes for buttons labels, menus, etc. Can we use the FreeType engine in such an environment? We would like to avoid keeping tens of different font tables (bitmaps). It would be nice to have a single font which gets scaled correctly to other sizes. Yes, FreeType has been specifically developed to work in memory-tight environments. Due to its modularity, you can strip off all components you don't need, making its footprint very small. The library is known to work on ARM, however, I don't know whether it works out of the box with your compiler and OS. Patches are highly welcomed :-) Werner ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
