Hi Thomas Thomas Oltmann <thomas.oltmann....@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
