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  <h1><a href="index.html">FreeType</a> &amp; GSoC</h1>
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          <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 &ldquo;I'm interested in your
            project, I want to contribute, please tell me what to
            do!&rdquo; again and again&hellip;</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 &lsquo;ftinspect&rsquo; 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
                &lsquo;ftview&rsquo; and &lsquo;ftgrid&rsquo;.  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
                &lsquo;ftinspect&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;ftgrid&rsquo;.</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&nbsp;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 &lsquo;how-to&rsquo;
                  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>

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        <div class="updated">
          <p>Last update: 16-Feb-2020</p>
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