From: Brian S. Julin <bri@tull.umassp.edu>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 09:57:54 -0400 (EDT)

Re: GgiPuts and Co...

On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Evan Martin wrote:
> 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.

As others have mentioned, caching all the fonts is not an option,
but making a cache system available for the most recently used 
glyphs is desirable.  Andy and Marcus and I are discussing ideas for 
a system for caching textures/glyphs/sprites both on-board and offboard; 
what form it will take is still being mulled over very thoroughly.  
Hopefully we'll have a workable concept sometime soon.  Once we do though, 
we'll probably leave it to someone else to develop a helper library 
that does auto-management of these buffers -- moving them on and 
off-card as appropriate and deallocating less used objects from memory.  
A common interface to font formats and server protocols will also need
a coder or three.

--
Brian