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Font rendering is the process of taking a character specification and turning it into a set of bits to be colored on the screen or a bitmap. The character specification can be defined by any different amount of CharacterSetEncodings. After the rendering information is located in a font file for a particular character, the rendering information has to be processed. The information is different for different types of fonts.
One font rendering engine that we might be able to possibly use is FreeType. This is already used on BeOS for the BePDF application. It is also used on linux if I am not mistaken.
Various issues that a font renderer has to handle include:
- color - blue, red, etc.
- size - usually specified in points
- kerning - roughly, distance between characters
- rotation - 0, 30, 90 degrees, etc.
- direction - left to right for english, right to left for hebrew
- diacritics - accents or stroke marks
- weight - bold
- shear - roughly, how slanty it is (think italic)
- anti-aliasing - making your font look good on the screen
- descendency - how far down characters such as j or y go
- ascendency - how far up characters such as A or P go above characters such as o or a.
- stacking - some fonts such as chinese can be naturally read vertically. meaning character on top of character, not characters rotated 90 degrees.
Please forgive my bad font term knowledge. :-)
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