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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 (started as a GSoC 2017 project,
              unfinished)</dt>
            <dd>
              <p>Right now, FreeType's rendering results of the
                current development version are not systematically
                compared to a baseline version.  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>Add support for the <code>WOFF2</code> fonts
            <dd>
              <p>FreeType currently supports WOFF 1.0 fonts,
              which are zlib-compressed SFNT fonts. The support for
              WOFF 2.0 with improved Brotli compression is lacking.
              This project would likely involve the following.

              <ul>
                <li>Study and compare the specifications how SFNT fonts are
                wrapped into <a href=https://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF/>WOFF 1.0</a>
                and <a href=https://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF2/>WOFF 2.0</a> files.
                Determine if they can be merged.</li>

                <li>Explore if it is possible to borrow
                <a href=https://github.com/google/woff2>Brotli decoder</a>
                donated by Google.</li>

                <li>Integrate seamless WOFF2 support into FreeType so that
                these fonts can be recognized, decompressed, and opened as
                any other SFNT font, without any changes to API.
              </ul>

              <p><em>Difficulty:</em> medium to
                high.  <em>Requirements:</em> C, Unix build
                tools.  <em>Potential mentors:</em> Werner Lemberg,
                Alexei Podtelezhnikov, Toshiya Suzuki (FreeType).</p>
            </dd>
          </dl>

          <dl>
            <dt>Add support for the &lsquo;<code>SVG </code>&rsquo;
              OpenType table to render color fonts</dt>
            <dd>
              <p>FreeType currently doesn't have support for fonts
                that <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/svg">use
                  SVG to render color glyphs</a>.  The task of this
                project would be as follows.</p>

              <ul>
                <li>Evaluate the freely available SVG libraries that
                  would fit the job best.</li>

                <li>Investigate how to integrate this external library
                  into FreeType.  For example, it should be checked
                  whether it makes sense to create a new font
                  rendering module (which would act more or less as a
                  wrapper to the external SVG library).</li>

                <li>If the module approach doesn't fit, define
                  FreeType API functions and hooks for transferring
                  data from the font's &lsquo;<code>SVG </code>&rsquo;
                  table to the external library.  Ditto for
                  transferring the resulting (bitmap) output back into
                  FreeType.</li>

                <li>Add the necessary infrastructure API stuff (for
                  example, a function to test whether a font has SVG
                  glyphs).</li>
              </ul>

              <p><em>Difficulty:</em> medium to
                high.  <em>Requirements:</em> C, Unix build
                tools.  <em>Potential mentors:</em> Werner Lemberg,
                Alexei Podtelezhnikov, Toshiya Suzuki (FreeType).</p>
            </dd>
          </dl>

          <dl>
            <dt>Improve the &lsquo;ftinspect&rsquo; demo program</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: 6-Feb-2019</p>
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