[Development] Making FreeType and platform-independent HarfBuzz-NG available on all platforms

[Andreas Hartmetz]

Hello,

we have a customer who is interested (among possibly other font 
rendering improvements) in using the same high-quality font stack on all 
platforms, for which HarfBuzz-NG / FreeType is the obvious candidate. I 
wonder if patches to do that would be accepted. It seems fairly 
uncontroversial to me, but you never know.

Note that, while FreeType is already available on Windows, it needs a 
lot of polishing to look as good as on Linux. It seems like 
rasterization is done by FreeType in that FreeType/Windows case, but for 
shaping HarfBuzz uses input (basically glyph bounding boxes) from 
Windows API, which causes things like cut-off glyphs because the two 
APIs don't quite agree about the metrics.

Some additional CI capacity might be required to test it on OSX - there 
is a bit of a conflict insofar that it's easier to make it a compile-
time option: on OSX things are curently pretty hard-wired to CoreText, 
including in HarfBuzz-NG itself, but that requires far more CPU power to 
test due to the need to compile another configuration. Does anyone have 
any ideas for solving this?

Cheers,
Andreas

-- 
Andreas Hartmetz | andreas.hartmetz at kdab.com | Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH&Co KG, a KDAB Group company
Tel. Germany +49-30-521325470, Sweden (HQ) +46-563-540090
KDAB - Qt Experts - Platform-independent software solutions
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