Re: [Freetype] WIN CE Port and Usage ?

[David Turner]

Hello Jeremy,

Jeremy a écrit :
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am developing a graphics application for WINCE.  WINCE as you may know is
> very limited in its graphics ability, specifically paths and bezier curves.
> I have had to replace a significant part of the CE graphics API with my own
> code and now have a hybrid API that provides nearly all the graphics
> elements I need.
> 
> CE fonts are still a problem as they are *very* slow.  I was wondering if
> freetype would help with that, so I guess my questions are :
>
 
> 1. Has freetype been ported to CE successfully ? (I have an EVC++ project
> that compiles the library O.K. but I have not tried it out yet)
>
There is no reason for FreeType not to work on CE, or any other platform,
at least if it provides an ANSI C library. Otherwise, you'll need to provide
a custom implementation of "ftsystem.c", which should represent very little
work..

 
> 2. Can I access the path information for individual glyphs as a complex
> polygon (ie after bezier reduction but before rendering to a bitmap)
>
Nope.. That's because the decomposition is different depending on the
rasterizer used, this allows dealing with subtle problems like rounding
errors when you live in a fixed-point world as FreeType does..

it's better to let application program perform the decomposition themselves,
using the scalar type ( fixed-point, float, double, ..) they most prefer..
and we have no intention to provide this for now..


> 3. How do I continue to use the WINCE native fonts but render them with the
> freetype engine?
>
Probably by writing a specific font driver that would grab the outlines and
bitmaps directly from the WinCE GDI. I don't know how easy grabbing charmaps,
kerning tables, etc.. is however..

 
> 4. Is freetype any faster than WINCE?
>
Don't know, give it a try, this shouldn't be too hard.. :-)

Regards,

- David