Development Version

The actual version in development is 0.6.0. This version has a number of changes, listed below. Try it from the CVS.

• The code is now pure C, before it was C++. I decided to change it because, although I like C++, I was only using it as syntactic sugar, and the compiler compatibility problems together with binary compatibility problems in the run time support libraries lead me to the change.
• It now needs GNOME installed to compile. I made this change because, as more features are added, I rely more on the GNOME libraries for work that I would need to do myself otherwise, reinventing the wheel. GNOME is spread enough nowadays, so I expect no problems from this. It makes things much easier, as supporting in the source at compile time a GNOME version and a non-GNOME version (as 0.5.0 tried to do) is very tricky and error prone.
• It removes dependency on T1lib, and uses Freetype 2, which is up to date and can handle more font formats.
• It supports these font formats: Type 1 (including multiple master), TrueType, CID keyed.
• It generates images in PNG format, no longer GIF. So it uses the libpng library.
• It makes use of GNOME VFS layer, so that you can view fonts over the net or, more realistically, fonts in tarballs.
  You can have problems compiling support for this, as some distributions do not fully install it. Download it and install it yourself to be on the safe side.

Some issues are open in this version. If you can help with ideas or code, please do.

• The fonttable does not handle encodings. I still do not know what is the best approach. I tend to think that I need two views:
  1. A Unicode based view, which would see each Unicode range (in groups of 256 glyphs) at a time.
  2. A view which just dumps all glyphs present in the font in groups of 256. This is already implemented.
• CID keyed fonts cannot be printed. No idea how to do it.
• Type42 fonts cannot be viewed. I am starting to code support for them, implemented as an additional font module for Freetype.
• Other font formats, supported by Freetype, are not yet supported.