From: BERNARD Sebastien <sebastien.bernard@cegetel.fr>
  To  : 'ggi-develop@eskimo.com' <ggi-develop@eskimo.com>
  Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 09:26:36 +0200

RE: GgiPuts and Co...

Not quite so.
I think (and andrea too) that we could cache all the rendered glyph.
So you can render an whole font into a bitmap then do some blitCopy between
the visual of the rendered font and the screen.
If we can be smart enough about the cache rendering, we could provide either
the
capability of rendering an whole font or rendering just the needed glyphs
(i.e. characters).
The point is that you often need a subset of the font (e is more common than
z which is
more common than the '|'). So if you are not short on memory, then you just
have to pay at
startup time.

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De:	Evan Martin [SMTP:txs@concentric.net]
> Date:	mardi 27 avril 1999 20:11
> À:	ggi-develop@eskimo.com
> Objet:	Re: GgiPuts and Co...
> 
> BERNARD Sebastien wrote:
> > 
> > I was just looking at the ggiPuts sources...
> > I saw that the character/string output is rather minimalistic...
> > I was wondering if it could be a Good Thing (TM) that one could use
> > tranparently
> > some rasterizing libs like freetype engine or t1lib engine to output
> some
> > texts on the screen.
> > This could already be done inside the application, but, I may exists
> some
> > kind of support by the ggi
> > (something like unified API to print strings with rotation and special
> > effects).
> > Maybe hardware support too. Should'nt be so hard to do.
> > 
> > Any comments ?
> 
> In a real-time application, I fear truetype(freetype) would be too slow.
> I've written a program that takes a truetype font and generates a .pnm
> (picture) and a .h file with the x-coordinates of the letters from the
> picture.  That way, it's easy to draw a letter, particularly after
> someone writes some surface blitting code for ggi.
> 
> It's rather integrated into the source of my project, but if anyone's 
> interested, I could split it out.
> 
> -- 
> Evan Martin - txs@concentric.net - http://e.x0r.ml.org