Hello everyone, just to inform you that FreeType 2.3.0rc1 is now available at the following web addresses:
http://david.freetype.org/freetype/freetype-2.3.0rc1.tar.gz http://david.freetype.org/freetype/freetype-2.3.0rc1.tar.bz2 http://david.freetype.org/freetype/ft230rc1.zip you can also grab it from the CVS using the VER-2-3-0-RC1 tag as the name suggest, this is a release candidate, not the final package. We now need to build and install it on many systems to check that everything works fine. The minor version number was increased due to what I believe are numerous improvements in auto-hinting, performance, memory usage, as well as new features like automatic support for unpatented hinting, LCD color filtering and a few more things. There should be *no* break of ABI or API since the last two releases (2.2.1 and 2.1.10), if you detect a severe problem when installing this version, that's clearly a bug that should be reported on this mailing list. Building/Installation volunteers are welcomed. I'm especially curious about warning messages happening during compilations on exotic platforms, since we try to *completely* prevent them in our official releases. Regards and enjoy, - David Turner - The FreeType Project (www.freetype.org) ================copy of docs/CHANGES============================ CHANGES BETWEEN 2.3.0 and 2.2.1 I. IMPORTANT BUG FIXES - The PCF font loader is now much more robust while loading malformed font files. - Various memory leaks have been found and fixed. - The TrueType name loader now deals properly with some fonts that encode their names in UTF-16 (the specification was vague, and the code incorrectly assumed UCS-4). - Fixed the TrueType bytecode loader to deal properly with subtle monochrome/gray issues when scaling the CVT. Some fonts exhibited bad rendering artifacts otherwise. - FT_GlyphSlot_Embolden now supports vertical layouts correctly (it mangled the vertical advance height). II. NEW API FUNCTIONS - `FT_Library_SetLcdFilter' allows you to select a special filter to be applied to the bitmaps generated by `FT_Render_Glyph' if one of the FT_RENDER_MODE_LCD and FT_RENDER_MODE_LCD_V modes has been selected. This filter is used to reduce color fringes; several settings are available through the FT_LCD_FILTER_XXX enumeration. Its declaration and documentation can be found in file `include/freetype/ftlcdfil.h' (to be accessed with macro FT_LCD_FILTER_H). *IMPORTANT*: This function returns an error (FT_Err_Unimplemented_Feature) in default builds of the library for patent reasons. See below. - `FT_Get_Gasp' allows you to query the flags of the TrueType `gasp' table for a given character pixel size. This is useful to duplicate the text rendering of MS Windows, when the native bytecode interpreter is enabled (which isn't the default for other patent reasons). Its declaration and documentation can be found in file `include/freetype/ftgasp.h' (to be accessed with macro FT_GASP_H). III. IMPORTANT CHANGES - The auto-hinter has been tuned a lot to improve its results with serif fonts, resulting in much better font rendering of many web pages. - The unpatented hinter is now part of the default build of the library; we have added code to automatically support `tricky' fonts that need it. This means that FreeType should `just work' with certain Asian fonts, like MingLiU, which cannot properly be loaded without a bytecode interpreter, but which fortunately do not use any of the patented bytecode opcodes. We detect these fonts by name, so please report any font file that doesn't seem to work with FreeType, and we shall do what we can to support it in a next release. Note that the API hasn't changed, so you can still force unpatented hinting with a special parameter to FT_Open_Face as well. This might be useful in same cases; for example, a PDF reader might present a user option to activate it to deal with certain `tricky' embedded fonts which cannot be clearly identified. If you are a developer for embedded systems, you might want to *disable* the feature to save code space by undefining TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING in ftoption.h. - LCD-optimized rendering is now DISABLED in all default builds of the library, mainly due to PATENT issues. For more information see: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype/2006-09/msg00064.html A new configuration macro FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING has been introduced in ftoption.h; manually define it in this file if you want to re-enable the feature. The change only affects the implementation, not the FreeType API. This means that clients don't need to be modified, because the library still generates LCD decimated bitmaps, but with the added constraint that R=G=B on each triplet. The displayed result should be equal to normal anti-aliased rendering. Additionally, if FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING is not defined, the new `FT_Library_SetLcdFilter' function returns the FT_Err_Unimplemented_Feature error code. - Some computation bugs in the TrueType bytecode interpreter were found, which allow us to get rid of very subtle and rare differences we had experienced with the Windows renderer. - It is now possible to cross-compile the library easily. See the file docs/INSTALL.CROSS for details. III. MISCELLANEOUS - Various performance and memory footprint optimizations have been performed on the TrueType and CFF font loaders, sometimes with very drastic benefits (e.g., the TrueType loader is now about 25% faster; FreeType should use less heap memory under nearly all conditions) - The anti-aliased rasterizer has been optimized and is now 15% to 25% percent faster than in previous versions, depending on content. - The Type 1 loader has been improved; as an example, it now skips top-level dictionaries properly. - The PFR font loader no longer erroneously tags font files without any outlines as FT_FACE_FLAG_SCALABLE. - Better support for Mac Fonts on POSIX systems, plus compilation fixes for PPC64. ====================================================================== _______________________________________________ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel