Re: [Freetype] FreeType memory requirements...

[David Turner]

Hello,

> David Block a écrit :
> 
> We're looking into using FreeType for an embedded product, and have two 
> questions:
> 1) What kind of RAM requirements the product has for data. We would be using 
> TT fonts and generating the bitmaps at 200DPI. Anybody want to hazard a
> guess?
>
FreeType includes a memory debugger that is very handy to determine memory 
requirements
of any application that uses it (i.e. the memory used by FreeType itself).

For example, the current "ftview" demo program is capable of rendering text with
any number of fonts with decent performance with a requirement of 250-300 Kb of
heap memory. This _includes_ the bitmap/outline cache..

Without the cache, the requirements depend on the fonts being used. I believe 
that
Times New Roman takes about 30Kb of heap memory, independently of the glyph 
images
themselves. It's possible to use less with memory-mapped or ROM font files but
don't ask me how much..

As announced recently, I'll try to reduce the memory footprint of the library
in upcoming releases of the font engine. This has very low priority however,
so don't count on this too soon, you'd be disappointed...
 
> 2) Anybody have any knowledge of commercial products build using FreeType in 
> an embedded form?
>
I believe the EPOC operating system (used in Psion PDAs) uses FreeType 1.x to 
render
TrueType fonts. There are numerous other examples that I'm not specifically 
allowed
to name here, but think about digital cameras, embedded printers and RIPs, 
digital TV
set-top-boxes, some PDA GUIs use it too (e.g. Qtopia)

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project (www.freetype.org)