TrueType Font Parsing in C

Question

Hi,

I want to read a ttf and draw a text with that font on a buffer. Even though there are libraries such as freetype, gd to do this task, I want to write my own code. Can you advice me on how to accomplish this task?

Answer 1

Unless you're one of the world's top experts on fonts, typography, and writing systems, the answer is simple: DON'T. TrueType/OpenType has a lot of tables you need to support for correct rendering, and even when using FreeType (which is an extremely low-level library), most people get it wrong.

If you need to do low-level, deterministic-across-platforms font handling, then at the very least, you should be using FreeType and libotf. This will provide you with access to the glyphs and outlines which you can then render however you like. In most cases though using your GUI system's text rendering routines will be a lot easier and less error-prone.

Finally, if you insist on ignoring my advice, a good RTFS on FreeType and Microsoft's online resources explaining the tables in TrueType/OpenType fonts are probably the best place to get started.

Answer 2

as R.. wrote the same time as i did in my comment, i would not to suggest to build another TTF-parser by your own. If you are eager to learn this very "spannende" field of Computer Science I would recommend "The Art of Computer Programming" Vol 2 from Donald E. Knuth. (it is Metafont, not TTF, but proven to be correct:-)