Re: [Fontforge-users] Does anyone know a "nice" fixed font with book/bold and straight/italic available for many sizes

[Igor C. <ic...@gm...>]

James,

Thanks for your kind suggestions.

I have downloaded freetype2 library, changed flags as indicated by
you, configured with

./configure --prefix ~/local

and installed it in $HOME/local.

Then I disabled system includes /usr/include/freetype2 by renaming the
directory, downloaded fontforge, and compiled it with


PATH=$PATH:~/local/bin ./configure --prefix ~/local
--with-freetype-src=$(pwd)/../freetype-2.3.9 --with-freetype-bytecode

(I had to change Makefile of gdraw to get it to include proper includes).

Then I did make install.

Running it with --library status says:

libfreetype     - is present and appears functional on your system.
	This provides a better rasterizer than the one built in to fontforge
	This version of freetype includes the byte code interpreter
	 which means you can use fontforge as a truetype debugger.
	Unfortunately this version of fontforge is not configured to use this
	 library.  You must rebuild from source.

So, it would appear that specifying
--with-freetype-src=$(pwd)/../freetype-2.3.9 --with-freetype-bytecode
when configure'ing fontforge is not enough?

Also my system (Ubuntu) fontforge says in response to same query:

libfreetype     - is present and appears functional on your system.
	This provides a better rasterizer than the one built in to fontforge
	This version of freetype includes the byte code interpreter
	 which means you can use fontforge as a truetype debugger.

Does this mean that my Ubuntu's fontforge is good to use those hints?

Anyway, maybe I should select some GUI option to use those hints and
that's all I need to do and that is what I neglected to select?

How exactly would I generate a high quality bitmap fonts?

How can I tell from GUI if hints are enabled or disabled?

thanks

Igor

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 6:41 PM, James Cloos <cl...@jh...> wrote:
> If you get poor looking bitmaps from existing sfnt/glyf fonts (aka ttf fonts),
> a likely issue is that your installed version of freetype was compiled without
> support for glyf instructions.
>
> You may want to try compiling a local copy of freetype with the interpreter
> enabled.
>
> You can edit the file include/freetype/config/ftoption.h in the freetype dist
> or you can pass -D and -U options in the CFLAGS when you run ./configure.
>
> Enable these by #define-ing them:
>
>    enable_option FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING
>    enable_option TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER
>    enable_option FT_CONFIG_OPTION_INCREMENTAL
>
> and disable these by #undef-ing them:
>
>    disable_option TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING
>    disable_option FT_CONFIG_OPTION_OLD_INTERNALS
>
> The bitmaps generated when using the instruction should be as good as
> one can get at any given pixmap size, provided the instructions are
> well designed.
>
> The instructions for much of DejaVu sans Mono, including those glyphs
> which were part of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and the Cyrillic glyphs,
> are well done.  Liberation Mono (hosted by Redhat/Fedora) are also
> well instructed.
>
> If fontforge still is problematic, I'd compile the X Font Server linked
> against the above-configured version of freetype and use that.  It would
> not be too much code to write a xfs client which only creates BDF files
> of fonts served by a given x font server; the xfs wire protocol is well
> documented.
>
> -JimC
> --
> James Cloos <cl...@jh...>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
>