From: BERNARD Sebastien <sebastien.bernard@cegetel.fr>
  To  : 'ggi-develop@eskimo.com' <ggi-develop@eskimo.com>
  Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:55:53 +0200

RE: GgiPuts and Co...

Of course. Remember that the point was about real-time application.
In this kind of application, you have to minimize the overhead of the simple
tasks.
The rendering of glyphs is overhead that should be done before the start of
application.
An application doesn't need thousands of glyphs for its GUI.
Some sequence came back over and over.
If you read my precedent post, I was talking about granularity of caching.
If applications don't need high quality tipographic rendering (like text
applications),
then, a rendering of the whole font at a certain scale is something to be
considered.
Caching the rendered glyphs is really touchy.
You just cannot cache each of the character (for latin ones I mean). Some
character have kerning,
some characters are different, whether they are next to some special one
(like the 'f' and the 'i' or the 'a' and the 'e').
In particular cases, you have to cache pairs of character, and so on...
I don't know the particularities of the asian typography rules. How about
approach of char, the space between words,
paragraphs, etc.. 
According to my memory, there are special fonts and alphabets to work around
the problem for the computer needs.
(Kanji fonts don't take Go of memories).

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De:	Dan Hollis [SMTP:goemon@sasami.anime.net]
> Date:	mercredi 28 avril 1999 09:56
> À:	'ggi-develop@eskimo.com'
> Objet:	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