1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
|
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type"
content="text/css">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type"
content="text/javascript">
<meta name="description"
content="Ideas for GSoC">
<meta name="keywords"
content="GSoC Ideas">
<link rel="icon"
href="image/favicon_-60.ico">
<link rel="shortcut icon"
href="image/favicon_-60.ico">
<link rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css"
href="css/freetype2_-60.css">
<script type="text/javascript"
src="js/jquery-1.11.0.min.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="js/jquery.ba-resize.min.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="js/freetype2.js">
</script>
<title>Ideas for Google Summer of Code</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="top"
class="bar">
<h1><a href="index.html">FreeType</a> & GSoC</h1>
</div>
<div id="wrapper">
<div class="colmask leftmenu">
<div class="colright">
<div class="col1wrap">
<div class="col1">
<!-- ************************************************** -->
<div>
<p>The FreeType project has successfully participated at
<a href="https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/">Google
Summer of Code</a>. Here is our ideas list for future
years – if you have another one, please write to
our <a href="mailto:freetype-devel@nongnu.org">mailing
list</a> so that we can discuss your suggestions,
eventually adding them to this page.</p>
<p>If you are interested to participate as a student, please
also contact us via
the <a href="mailto:freetype-devel@nongnu.org">mailing
list</a>. It's probably best if
you <a href="https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel">subscribe</a>
to it.</p>
<p class="warning">Before contacting us, however, you should
get <em>really</em> acquainted with the topic you would
like to start with – in particular, search
the <a href="https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/">mailing
list archive</a> and/or do some googling! We don't want
to answer questions like “I'm interested in your
project, I want to contribute, please tell me what to
do!” again and again…</p>
<dl>
<dt>Develop a test framework for checking FreeType's
rendering output</dt>
<dd>
<p>Right now, FreeType's rendering results of the
current development version are not systematically
compared to a baseline version, using continuous
integration (CI) or something similar. This is
problematic, since rendering regressions can be very
easily missed due to subtle differences.</p>
<p>The idea is to select a representative set of
reference fonts from font corpora (which already exist
mainly for fuzzing). The fonts are used to produce
glyph images for various sizes and rendering modes
(anti-aliased, B/W, native hinting, auto-hinting,
etc.). FreeType can already produce MD5 checksums of
glyph images as part of its debugging output; these
values should be compared against a baseline version
of rendering results. If there are differences, HTML
pages should be generated that contain comparison
images of the baseline's and the current development
version's rendering result, ideally indicating how
large the differences between the images are by using
some yet to be defined measure.</p>
<p><em>Difficulty:</em> medium. <em>Requirements:</em>
C, Unix build tools. <em>Potential mentors:</em>
Werner Lemberg, Alexei Podtelezhnikov, Toshiya Suzuki
(FreeType).</p>
</dd>
</dl>
<dl>
<dt>Update FreeType's build systems</dt>
<dd>
<p>Due to historical reasons, FreeType's build systems
are strange to newcomers. The default one is based
on <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/make/"><code>GNU
make</code></a>, also
integrating <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/"><code>autoconf</code></a>
support. Alternatives are generic build files
for <a href="https://cmake.org/"><code>cmake</code></a>
and <a href="https://www.freetype.org/jam/"><code>ftjam</code></a>,
together with special support files
for <a href="https://visualstudio.microsoft.com">MS
Visual
Studio</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS">OpenVMS</a>,
and some even more exotic, old platforms.</p>
<p>This project is intended to update the build systems.
Here is a preliminary list of tasks.</p>
<ul>
<li>Investigate which build systems should be
retained, modified, added, removed, etc.,
approaching the project with a conservative point of
view. This needs intensive contact with the mailing
list(s) to identify the needs of users and the
preferences of developers.</li>
<li>Check software distributions for different
platforms and analyze how FreeType's build systems
are modified for integration. This might give
further hints on necessary changes or
adaptations.</li>
<li>Especially for <code>cmake</code> support, there
are a bunch of issues
in <a href="https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=freetype">Freetype's
bug tracker</a> that should be taken care of.</li>
<li>Modernize and update the build system based on the
outcome of the previous items. This might also
include changes in the directory structure of the
source files if necessary and useful.</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Difficulty:</em> medium. <em>Requirements:</em>
Various Unix and Windows build tools, in
particular <code>GNU make</code>
and <code>cmake</code>. <em>Potential mentors:</em>
Werner Lemberg, Alexei Podtelezhnikov, Toshiya Suzuki
(FreeType).</p>
</dd>
</dl>
<dl>
<dt>Improve the ‘ftinspect’ demo program
(started as a GSoC 2019 project, unfinished)</dt>
<dd>
<p>Right now, FreeType comes with a suite of small
graphic tools to test the library, most notably
‘ftview’ and ‘ftgrid’. The
used graphics library, while working more or less, is
very archaic, not having any comfort that modern GUIs
are providing.</p>
<p>To improve this, a new demo program called
‘ftinspect’ was started, based on the Qt
GUI toolkit. However, the development is currently
stalled, mainly for lack of time.</p>
<p>The idea is to finish ftinspect,
handling <em>all</em> aspects of the other demo
programs. Currently, it only provides the
functionality of ‘ftgrid’.</p>
<p>If the student prefers, the Qt toolkit could be
replaced with GTK.<p>
<p><em>Difficulty:</em> medium. <em>Requirements:</em>
C, C++, Qt, Unix build tools. <em>Potential
mentor:</em> Werner Lemberg (FreeType).</p>
</dd>
</dl>
<dl>
<dt>Replace FreeType's tracing and debugging facilities
with an external logging library</dt>
<dd>
<p>FreeType extensively uses a home-brewed tracing
solution that mainly relies on the C preprocessor
and the <code>fprintf</code> function printing to
<code>stderr</code>. However, this simplistic
approach is not adequate for all platforms, where
<code>stderr</code> is not always easily
accessible.</p>
<p>Many freely available tracing and logging libraries
exist. It would be necessary to test and check which
one meets FreeType's requirements. A few requirements
have already been
<a href="http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2019-01/msg00023.html">discussed
in the mailing list</a>. Note that this discussion
is by no means exhaustive.</p>
<p>As a rough guideline, the project could be structured
as follows.</p>
<ul>
<li>Get accustomed to FreeType's current
tracer/logger, all its current features, and how it
is currently being used. Extract a few
representative samples from FreeType to help with
the next step.</li>
<li>Evaluate, compare, and discuss freely available
tracing and logging libraries in respect to
FreeType's current tracer/logger.</li>
<li>Replace the old tracer/logger with the new one
within FreeType.</li>
<li>Write a brief but precise ‘how-to’
article for FreeType's website about using the new
tracer/logger which is aimed at FreeType's
developers.</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Difficulty:</em> medium. <em>Requirements:</em>
C, C++, Unix and Windows build tools. <em>Potential
mentors:</em> Werner Lemberg, Alexei Podtelezhnikov,
Toshiya Suzuki (FreeType), Armin Hasitzka.</p>
</dd>
</dl>
<p>Do you have more ideas? Please write to
our <a href="mailto:freetype-devel@nongnu.org">mailing
list</a> so that we can discuss your suggestions,
eventually adding them to the list!</p>
</div>
<!-- ************************************************** -->
<div class="updated">
<p>Last update: 16-Feb-2020</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<!-- ************************************************** -->
<div class="col2">
</div>
</div>
</div>
<!-- ************************************************** -->
<div id="TOC">
<ul>
<li class="funding">
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr"
method="post"
target="_top">
<input type="hidden"
name="cmd"
value="_s-xclick">
<input type="hidden"
name="hosted_button_id"
value="SK827YKEALMT4">
<input type="image"
src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donateCC_LG.gif"
name="submit"
alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
<img alt=""
border="0"
src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/de_DE/i/scr/pixel.gif"
width="1"
height="1">
</form>
</li>
<li class="primary">
<a href="index.html">Home</a>
</li>
<li class="primary">
<a href="index.html#news">News</a>
</li>
<li class="primary">
<a href="freetype2/docs/index.html">Overview</a>
</li>
<li class="primary">
<a href="freetype2/docs/documentation.html">Documentation</a>
</li>
<li class="primary">
<a href="developer.html">Development</a>
</li>
<li class="primary">
<a href="contact.html"
class="emphasis">Contact</a>
</li>
<li>
<!-- separate primary from secondary entries -->
</li>
<li class="secondary">
<a href="gsoc.html" class="current">FreeType & GSoC</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div> <!-- id="wrapper" -->
<div id="TOC-bottom">
</div>
</body>
</html>
|