Re: Motif support

[Po Lu]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> The benefit of using unified platform and not needing to use os
> built-ins?  This discussion started with someone wanted Emacs to do
> it's own drawing since Emacs GUI is relatively simple and does not
> require full-fledged GUI toolkit. Freetype would be one tool to
> achieve this.

That benefit is hardly established.

> I dont understand what different interfaces are with freetype you are
> talking about nor what is difficult with freetype? Freetype gives you
> platform independent interface to read, parse and render fonts files
> to bitmaps. You can also do your own rendering if you want. Lots of
> platform independent applications use Freetype to render fonts.

What about locating the font files to open? Scaling glyphs, which is
usually the job of the platform, and essentially required for color
Emoji? What about displaying the resulting bitmap, or decomposed glyph
outline?

All those tasks need platform-dependent code, and about the same amount
as supporting the native font rasterizer.

> Freetype does not need fontconfig. I don't understand why bring
> fontconfig here. Fontcnfig uses freetype to read and parse font files,
> but freetype does not need fontconfig.

Then take a look at ftfont.c, the "abstract" FreeType font driver,
unless you're saying we should also reinvent the (platform-specific)
code to detect and use installed fonts?