RFS: 0ad

[Philip Taylor]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 5:35 PM, Adam Borowski <kilobyte at angband.pl> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 04:33:47PM +0100, Philip Taylor wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 1:24 AM, Paul Wise <pabs at debian.org> wrote:
>> > Preferably you would render text at run-time, since that
>> > enables i18n. For finding font files use fontconfig (preferred) and or
>> > a build-time parameter for finding them.
>>
>> My main concern is that that wouldn't provide sufficient consistency -
>> different versions of Freetype, or the same version with different
>> configuration (bytecode interpreter, autohinter, etc), might render
>> the same font quite differently and break the look of the game.
>
> Why won't you force the settings then?  If you are afraid the user's
> configuration might be ill-fitting, specify them by hand.

The important ones that I'm aware of are compile-time settings
(TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER/TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING)
so we can't override them. It seems the relevant patents only expired
about a year ago, and some distros respected the patents before then -
I have no idea how many users are still running systems in the
unpatented mode, but in the absence of data I assume it's non-zero,
and I'd rather not make changes that add complexity and could make the
game worse for some users unless there's sufficient benefit.

(I expect this may change in the future - once we eventually add i18n
support and non-Latin-alphabet languages there will be some benefit to
loading fonts dynamically (and it'd be simpler to load all fonts that
way), and I could probably collect data on how many of our users have
poor-quality Freetypes if there is no existing data indicating it's a
negligible number, but those are probably unlikely to happen within
the next few months.)

-- 
Philip Taylor
excors at gmail.com