From: BERNARD Sebastien <sebastien.bernard@cegetel.fr>
  To  : 'ggi-develop@eskimo.com' <ggi-develop@eskimo.com>
  Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 19:30:19 +0200

RE: GgiPuts and Co...

Caching all the font is sometimes an optionin the case of bitmap fonts.
You know, this kind of font is already rasterized. So, if you want to use
such a font,
the best thing is to consider that it is a font already rendered and
available in the cache.
So in this case, all the font is in the cache. It is a way to unify the
raster fonts and the 
scalable fonts (like TT, T1,...).
The thing you are considering is an unified high level garbage collector for
some object I
would name as Drawable. Quite touchy to write !!!


Such a beast would be really cool to help developper.
But we should leave him the possibility to handle their own buffer managment
policy.
Something like a default policy management which could be overridable by the
application.
Then user will lock, unlock its buffer.

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De:	Brian S. Julin [SMTP:bri@tull.umassp.edu]
> Date:	mercredi 28 avril 1999 15:58
> À:	ggi-develop@eskimo.com
> Objet:	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