Status of FreeType support

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

Even more hacking, and the FreeType support is much yummier.  You can now
select styles and they work, and saving works, and the font menu scrolls
(due to a hack from Dillo).  It's all very pretty.  Debian users who
install sharefonts and freefonts should see a *lot* of fonts.  The two big
missing things are libart support and printing.  

Libart support shouldn't be bad, and may solve the problem with characters
having white blocks around them.  I'm even considering restricting FreeType
support to Libart-capable rendering.  Unfortunately, the libart support is
skimpy, if somebody could help me draw a simple alpha mask (which is
basically what a character is), I'd be happy.  That would also allow png
export. 

Printing is a different fish altogether.  For that, we'd need to convert
the fonts into Type 1 (losing hinting, which we don't use right now anyway)
or Type 42 (which only newer (about 1998+) printers support.  Either case
will be a fair amount of work, AFAICT.  Code-grabbing solutions heartily
welcome.

Minor things to add would be use of a cache, probably the one in FreeType,
handling of font families with no face names, and use of hinting.

Please to bang on current version to see if there's something I've
overlooked (which there probably is).  Unless somebody gives me hints about
the libart things, I shall let this lie now and go back to looking at units
(about which I shall post some nasty design questions soon).

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?