Using rusttype instead of freetype?

[fschutt]

Just a question, but is the webrender team aware of rusttype? Is there any reason why you are using freetype instead? Right now, you have to ship the freetype DLL with the binary, which complicates deployment.

Is it planned to migrate to rusttype in the future or is the team not interested?

[jrmuizel]

Yep, we're aware. rusttype doesn't have enough features to give native looking fonts (e.g. it's missing hinting and opentype outline support).

You shouldn't need to ship freetype though, instead you can just use the system freetype.

[fschutt]

What do you mean by "system freetype"? On Windows, you still have to ship the DLL, or am I missing something?

[leeoniya]

isnt the plan to use pathfinder for glyph & path rendering? it already supports hinting and outlines i think.

https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder

[jrmuizel]

On Windows WebRender uses DirectWrite and on macOS it uses CoreGraphics so we don't need FreeType on those platforms.

Pathfinder doesn't have sufficient hinting support to replace the OS stuff yet, we're not exactly sure what are our plan to deal with that will be.

[fschutt]

Ah ok. Should I leave this open? If rusttype would have these features, would it be appropriate to switch?

[jrmuizel]

We'll close it for now and can file something new if rusttype becomes more mature.