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Text File | 1997-10-03 | 10.4 KB | 248 lines

The FreeType mini-FAQ: Summary: 0. Where to find the latest FreeType release? 1. What do you mean by 'Beta'? 2. What does the 'Free' in FreeType means? Can you use it in a commercial product? (YES!) Is it LGPL? (Yes and No, long) 3. I have made a small program based on the test programs but I would like to know how to do xxx? 4. What is this weird C source format? It's non-standard! 5. When will I be able to use FreeType to display TrueType fonts under X11, OS/2 or Wine? 6. Trying to compile the FreeType sources gives me lots of warnings with my ANSI C compliant compiler! -------------------------------------------------------------------- 0. Where to find the latest FreeType release? The latest package has been uploaded in two formats, with distinct CR/LF conventions. * for DOS and OS/2 : 'ft-beta.zip' (about 375K) Has been recently uploaded to the HOBBES archive. currently at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/incoming, should soon go to ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/fonts One can also get it in: ftp://ftp.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/pub/freetype * for UNIX and Amiga : 'freetype-AR4.tar.gz' (about 290K) Available now at ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/fonts or at our FTP site in: ftp://ftp.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/pub/freetype Note that the archives contents are exactly the same. The size difference comes only from the different linefeed conventions, and the fact that a 'tar.gz' compresses better than a 'zip'. Daily snapshots of the CVS repository are available at ftp://ftp.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/pub/freetype/devel We now have a web page at: http://www.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/~robert/freetype.html (Screenshots available) Note that the page and the screen shots may not be up to date. The home site of the FreeType project is ftp://ftp.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/pub/freetype There is also a mailing list: freetype@lists.lrz-muenchen.de send the usual subscription commands to: majordomo@lists.lrz-muenchen.de Any suggestions/bug reports are welcome. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. What do you mean by 'Public Beta'? The previous alpha releases were published for informative purposes, and each went through several design changes to accomodate new functionalities and goals. This release is a beta, which means that - it contains a _complete_ and _functional_ API and implementation - it may contain bugs, and we invite you to report them after having read the bug report at our web page ( http://www.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/~robert/freetype.html ) - The API won't evolve in the future unless we find serious defects. We thus encourage you to start testing and developing your own products based on this release. A simple recompile should be needed when FreeType 1.0 comes out ! Notice that this labelling is unlike the one used more and more often by commercial vendors, whose 'betas' are unfinished versions of the products, lacking many important features. This trend is the shame of the software industry, and we do not encourage it. In other words, this release could also be labelled 'GA' or 'final' by marketers. We're happy not to succomb to this. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. What does the 'Free' in FreeType means? Can you use it in a commercial product? (YES!) Is it LGPL? We believe that TrueType is a great technology (thanks to Apple engineers) and want to make it available on all platforms or machines. The engine is released free of charge, with source code, in order to be sure that it can be spread as widely as possible. However, free does not mean public domain. This engine is copyrighted by its authors, and they will fiercely defend their rights. There are a number of standard licenses that protect the rights of free software authors, one of the most famous being the GNU Public License (GPL). Though the GPL is probably the only license that protects both the software's author and its users, it mandates that all work based on or containing GPL-ed software become GPL itself. This simple rule prevents any use of the software other than with GPL-ed one. Commercial products as well as freeware ones released by their authors under any other licenses cannot use the software though it is "free". A different license called the Library GPL (or LGPL) applies to libraries, stating that any program, even commercial ones, have the right to dynamically link to a LGPL-ed DLL, as long as the source code, or an object file, for the library is distributed with the product. This is better, as it has allowed a lot of various freeware programs to use LGPL-ed libraries. Use in commercial products is much more seldom, of course... (the GPL-ed DLL *must* come with a copy of the Library GNU Public License, which is not very 'pleasant' for many companies and developers). Actually, LGPL is one of the best way to prevent a program to go into a commercial product. However, LGPL is still too limited for FreeType. What if someone wants to put the engine on a laser printer or PDA ROM? What if a DOS or console game maker want to use it to display nice characters? There are places were dynamic linking is not available, and even if all modern operating systems include it, there will probably always be some specific cases that will exclude it for any technical reason. Because we hope wide distribution and acceptance, we must accept that FreeType be included in any kind of product, in more or less exotic ways. In order to allow any company to use the engine, we decided to propose two kinds of licensing. So: - This package is released under the terms of the LGPL so as to benefit from its protection. Feel free to test and stress it. - However, for companies and developers who are not willing to accept the LGPL (we understand you), an alternate license, which is also free, can be obtained contacting the authors. (Note that this license will only be valid with the agreement of all authors). We however sincerely invite you to wait for the final release before asking for any license but LGPL... -------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. I have made a small program based on the test programs but I would like to know how to do xxx? (Where xxx is a feature lacking from the current implementation). Sorry, but we will not answer this question. As stated above, this is an Alpha release that is subject to a lot of design changes. Even if there is a way to do what you want with the current release, we won't try helping you as any semantics and features could disappear or be changed before the next release. The test programs do *not* illustrate the way to use FreeType. They just demonstrate performance. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. What is this weird C source format? It's non standard! (by David Turner) This format is my own and comes from my experience of reading tons of C, Pascal and Ada sources, especially large sources. I like to describe it as 'airy' and 'columned'. I chose this representation because I find it produces much more readable sources, especially when printed (paper *is* the ultimate debugger!). Of course, that's purely a matter of taste, as one could find the extra spaces and newlines unpleasant on a 25-lines text window. We may, for the final release, process the whole source through a C beautifier. Please read the file doc/convtns.txt for a list of our current formatting and design conventions. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. When will I be able to use FreeType to display TrueType fonts under X11, OS/2 or Wine? Well, that is not FreeType, really! FreeType is a *portable* library, which means that we try very hard to avoid depending on system specifics (like runtime libraries, memory and I/O management). An X11 or Wine font engine is something that is highly tied to a given system, and writing a font server based on FreeType will require the modification of some specific elements to adapt them to the host system. The engine is modular enough to allow that quite easily, but a font server has to deal with various kinds of constraints (like metrics, caching, shared data, etc.) that are not part of FreeType, and will never be! Note that an XFree or Wine font server should use a non-LGPL license. We have already volunteers to develop font servers for X11, Wine and OS/2 based on FreeType. It seems that there are some early prototypes for X11 and OS/2, but as the library will change much before the beta, it may not be too useful to release them. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. Trying to compile the FreeType sources gives me lots of warnings with my ANSI C compliant compiler! We have seriously reduced the number of warnings produced during compilation. For example, compiling the library with gcc and the '-pedantic -ansi -Wall' flags ( all warnings and pedantic ANSI checks ) gives no warnings anymore. The test programs (especially the graphics drivers) may produce some warnings that should be ignored.