Hi Thomas
Thomas Oltmann <thomas.oltmann.hhg_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Last year at slcon6, I demo'd a toy TrueType font renderer (*) to a
> couple people.
> Someone there suggested it'd be really useful to have this as a proper
> library for suckless projects to use,
> and so after a complete rework to make it actually usable, I'm finally
> able to release it under the name libschrift!
> You can find it here: https://www.github.com/tomolt/libschrift
>
> What you'll notice is that, similar to other font rendering libraries,
> libschrifts API is very low-level;
> In future, I'll probably write a wrapper library that abstracts away
> most of this.
> For right now, there's at least an example/demo application called sftdemo.
> sftdemo shows how to use libschrift to render text to an X11 window
> completely without Xft or FreeType2.
> To do this, sftdemo uses the same underlying interface that Xft is
> also built upon.
>
> Still, you shouldn't use libschrift for anything serious quite yet.
> Most notably, compound glyph support is still missing,
> so some characters like Umlauts or accents will likely not work yet.
>
> As a proof of concept, I might at some point write a patch for dmenu
> (or something like it)
> that replaces all of its Xft / FreeType2 usage with libschrift.
>
> I can keep you all posted if you're interested.
That's a really cool project!
I am interested in linguistics and, to a lesser degree, in 2D
graphics. Lately I was thinking that I really should look into font
rendering as that is where those two interests meet :P this library is
a good starting point for me!
I had a quick look and currently it looks like it's mostly useful for
rendering of fonts in X. I wonder how an interface would look like that
could also be used for text rendering for a Wayland client. I assume the
library would instead just render to some graphics memory to be rendered
by the compositor, but I am not completely sure.
Cheers,
Silvan
Received on Thu Apr 23 2020 - 09:30:56 CEST