[Freetype] The kind of anti-aliased colored fonts I'm talking about...

[Pedriana, Paul]

I posted last month lamenting the imability of font systems to support 
colored alpha blended fonts. I also mentioned that in the game industry, 
all the best quality games implement this. I thought I'd post a typical
example taken from Blizzard's Warcraft series of games. Here is a 
typical screenshot of what I'm talking about:
      http://www.blizzard.com/war3/screenshots/s14-large.shtml

Click on the image to see it at 100% scale. Click on the "next screenshot" 
link to see other screenshots. Here is another example:
      http://www.blizzard.com/diablo2exp/screenshots/800x/ss06b.shtml

This is the kind of text display we want and while standard TrueType and 
PostScript text is OK and convenient, they are not as professional looking 
as anti-aliased colored ("ARGB") text. I think that perhaps they lack the 
support for ARGB because they were designed at a time when alpha was
considered somewhat exotic for realtime desktop computing.

The Freetype documentation for FT_Bitmap suggests that in fact colored
bitmaps are a possibility if a driver was written for such a thing. I
imagine
that this is the route I want to take. It seems that the num_grays field
would be meaningless for such a thing and that the pixel_mode field 
would be set to some value defining the ARGB format of the bitmap. 
As many people are aware, there are many common ARGB formats, such 
as ARGB_8888, ARGB_1555, RGBA_5551, and ARGB_4444. The pixel 
mode field, however, says how many bits there are, and says nothing about
what the format of the bits is.

Thanks.