From: Dan Hollis <goemon@sasami.anime.net>
  To  : 'ggi-develop@eskimo.com' <ggi-develop@eskimo.com>
  Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 00:55:41 -0700 (PDT)

RE: GgiPuts and Co...

On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, BERNARD Sebastien wrote:
> 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.

You *dont* want to do this with asian fonts. There are tens of thousands
of code points.

> 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.

On kanji fonts this could be hours and gigabytes of ram :-)

Good font engines cache rendered glyphs, but also have a FIFO to flush
least recently used cached glyphs.

-Dan