Accepting contributions for Rust-based font indexing?

[Keith Packard]

From: Dominik Röttsches <drott at chromium.org>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2024 18:11:05 +0300

Hi Akira & FontConfig community,

Allow me to introduce myself, I am Dominik Röttsches, I work as an
engineer on the Chrome rendering team.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on accepting contributions to
FontConfig that provide an alternative indexing code path and build
configuration that does not require FreeType, but instead uses the
Rust-based Fontations libraries [1] developed by Google Fonts.

> * Would you be ready to consider accepting such contributions?

Assuming the Fontations library has a suitable license, that sounds
fantastic. From the subject, I hoped you were planning on re-writing
fontconfig in Rust as well, but it sounds like that's not in plan
(yet). Alas.

> * Do you see dependencies other than indexing that require FreeType?
> (FreeType specific API functions [3] would need to be compiled out in
> the Fontations build).

Many fonts lie about their code point coverage, so fontconfig has to
examine each glyph outline to see if they generate any ink. This doesn't
require rasterization, but it does require being able to see the outline
data. I'm not sure if Fontations has support for that, but you'll need
to make that work for fontconfig's coverage data to be accurate.

-- 
-keith
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 832 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/attachments/20240906/467b6692/attachment.sig>