FreeType

Mentors: Student: Ahmet Göksu

The goal of this project is to improve the ftbench program in FreeType's build structure for easier performance testing. The current manual process is slow and prone to errors. The plan is to create an automatic system to compare the performance of an older version with the current one. The project involves making a way to compare performance, creating an easy-to-read HTML report, and adding the report to FreeType's CI on GitLab. The final results include the comparison method, the HTML report, the CI integration, and clear documentation.

Mentors: Student: gerzytet

It is easy to render fonts well on screens with high pixel density. However, straightforward algorithms run into problems when rendering with few pixels available. For example, fonts where the capital “O” is taller than the capital “T”, or vice versa, should have these characters rendered at the same height when few pixels are available to avoid bumpy-looking text. Many modern font formats contain “hints” in these cases, which tell the renderer how it should align each symbol in the font to the pixel grid to create the most legible and consistent rendering. However, not all fonts and font formats contain hints. In these cases, the auto-hinter can be enabled, which analyzes the shapes in the font to fix some common issues that would normally be fixed by manually added hints. This project aims to further improve this process by adding corrections for specific letters, such as “i”, where the dot can merge with the stem, and “ñ”, where the tilde can lose its shape and become flat. These changes would be described in a capabilities database with a format designed as part of the project.

Mentors: Student: Anurag Thakur

Investigate and implement alternative font renderers in FreeType, including: • font-rs: A font renderer developed by Raph Levien. A blogpost describes some of its features in more detail. It claims to be much faster than FreeType's anti-aliasing rendering module by using different data structures, SIMD optimizations etc. • font-go: Port of font-rs to the Go programming language, includes a fixed-point implementation that is allegedly 1.4 times faster. • fontdue: It is another rendering engine based on font-rs, and it claims to be even faster and is actively developed. Additional discussion can be found here. • Pathfinder: Another project inspired by font-rs is Pathfinder, which takes advantages of GPU rendering. The project involves continuing and eventually finalizing the GSoC 2022 contribution, including but not limited to improving build system support, adding SIMD optimizations to more processors, improving documentation etc

Mentors: Student: Jiang Zhirui

In this project, the Qt-based ftinspect program in the FreeType Demo Programs project is improved from a skeleton with extremely limited functionalities to a comprehensive font inspection tool. It is integrated with functionalities from other showcase tools, such as ftgrid, ftview, and ftstring. The UI and UX also make a big step towards better user-friendless and intuitiveness.

Mentors: Student: Anurag Thakur

Investigate and implement alternative font renderers in FreeType, including: • font-rs • font-go • fontdue • Pathfinder Thus the project is about implementing an alternative FT_Renderer module in C that can take priority over the native FreeType rasterizer after carefully analysing the available work. If required, any Rust code will be ported to C to ensure maximum portability of the code.