Douglas Ridgway wrote:
> > Also, we need more font support. Is there any kind of font rasterizer in
> > wine? We implemented some code to read font data and curve data out of
> > truetype fonts that we're willing to contribute, but since there's no
> > rasterizer, it would be mostly useless.
>
> My opinion is that the X server is the place for the font rasterizer. Wine
> needs additional interfaces beyond what X provides, which means either
> extending the X Font Protocol or using a custom font server.
>
> I don't know how this interacts with printing, however.
The code for interfacing with BitStream's FontTastic font server is in
the Corel tree. The BitStream server supports an extended XFS api that
allows us to do things like get a glyph outlines, etc. The API itself is
readily visible in the header files, though the actual client interface
library (a derivative of the XFS interface library used by X Servers) is
only available as a binary. Bitstream might be convinced to allow Corel
to release the source portion of the library, but it shouldn't be strictly
necessary if someone wants to extend the XFree 4.0 FreeType enabled xfs with
the same extensions.
The integration in the Corel tree is rather hackish, since it actually
ends up mixing the psdrv and the x11drv code a fair bit. There's also a
ton of #ifdefs. It was done on a very tight schedule for the amount of
work that was required.
Ideally, we would implement fonts in the graphice drivers on top of
the font engine interfaces that are already defined for NT device
drivers. That way, one would be able to take a binary printer driver
and have it work properly. The font engine interfaces could then
be implemented in an abstract way so as to support multiple possible
back ends (FreeType direct linking, extended XFS protocol, etc).
It would be a fair bit of work, and I'm pretty sure that there would
be X client/server related issues that I haven't really explored very
much.
I posted about this a while ago, but neither Huw nor I came up with
a definitive plan.
-Gav
--
Gavriel State
CEO
TransGaming Technologies
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
