Hello Charlie,
> I'm interested in contributing to the project "*Improve FreeType > demo programs*". Very nice, and welcome! > 1. My main workspace is running Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2019. > Therefore the binaries are built on that, using mesonbuild. > However, I'm facing great difficulty building one certain > dependency *librsvg* on Windows + MSVC. It has several more > dependencies. Although I managed to get most from conan build, > *Gdk-Pixbuf* is still failing due to a link error in glib (maybe > glib recipe on conan is also problematic, more testing needed). > Therefore, on Windows, I manually edited the build.meson of > freetype-demos, dropping the librsvg dependency and removing the > |HAVE_LIBRSVG| switch. I wonder about the consequence of doing > this. Eventually, the problem with 'librsvg' on Windows should be fixed. I'm not a Windows user so I can't help (maybe Alexei can). However, a quick search in the internet gives me https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/librsvg/-/tree/main/win32 Does this help? Otherwise, compiling the demo programs without 'librsvg' is fully sufficient for improving the demo programs. > I noticed two build systems are maintained for ftinspect (meson > and qmake) - is it desired? Good question, I don't know. Revising FreeType's build system is another GSoC project :-) > The grid size is definite, so the character size may exceed the grid > size. This is due to my limited knowledge of Qt programming. The grid should be indefinite. > Some convenience operations are missing in the ftinspect program > (no drag-drop file open, no mouse wheel zoom etc.). The same – and a lack of stamina. Improvements are most welcomed. > 4. I've played around with ftgrid and ftview, but not all features > of them. They directly crash when I press "?" if an IME is > enabled (e.g. MS Pinyin Input Method). Interesting. Alexei? > Some keys are not working on Windows (notably arrow keys, maybe > related to console-attachment problems) The keyboard-based > control is not so straightforward (at least for Windows users), > and moving towards a fully Qt-based GUI could certainly relieve > this. Do you have suggestions how to improve that? > However, I noticed some automation functionalities are present > (-k option, and p stroke). Should I consider them in ftinspect > project? Ideally yes, allowing `ftinspect` being executed on the command line as a batch program. Alas, such an approach doesn't work on Windows since on that platform you can't execute a GUI program on the command line. > 5. There're other tools besides ftgrid and ftview (ftbench, ftchkwd, > ftdiff ...). Should I include all of them in ftinspect as well? Not all demo programs make sense for inclusion. `ftbench` and `ftdiff`, however, are useful. > 6. I'm not familiar with text rendering and font processing, > therefore I'm refering to FreeType documentations and other > online materials. Are those skills considered as prerequisites > before I submit my proposal? No, those skills are not prerequisites. > 7. The proposal submitting has already begun. Am I too late to begin a > proposal? Not at all :-) It's great that you are interested in helping us. Werner
