190347 - Let FreeType2 handle Type1/etc rendering too.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Graphics, enhancement)

Description

[Adam D. Moss]

Mozilla has the neat innate ability to use the FreeType2 library to render
anti-aliased truetype fonts.  You point the config file at the directory in
which you keep your .tff fonts, and the world is good.

FreeType2 also nicely renders and optionally anti-aliases Type1 (as typically
used by X servers for scalable fonts) and some other font types.  But just
dropping Type1 fonts and other random font types into the same directory as the
.tff fonts doesn't work; the fonts are skipped with an error when mozilla starts
up and scans the directory.

It would be nice if I could use my usual X11 Type1 fonts in the same way as I
use my truetype fonts.  FreeType claims to offer a fairly homogenous interface
to accessing various font types, so I imagine that Mozilla's code is already
close to having this just work.

Comment 1

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

Yeah, it might be pretty simple.  I'll look into it.  Do you have some decent
sample fonts to play with?

Comment 2

[Adam D. Moss]

The scaleable fonts I have are the usual ones that come with
XFree86 4, plus the sharefonts package found on gimp.org that
you're probably already familiar with.

Comment 3

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Does it work in a recent trunk build?
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Comment 4

[Zack Weinberg (:zwol)]

This might still be a valid enhancement request; redirecting to Core:Graphics.

Comment 5

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

We use Freetype for all text rendering on Linux now.