Over in gst-cairo-widgets, I've been experimenting with the-simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work for font rendering. A small program, chew.c, uses FreeType 2 to extract metrics and glyph outlines from system fonts (TrueType, Postscript, etc.) and writes the resulting information using a simple text-based format.
font.rkt here reads fonts encoded in such a format. Two example
typefaces are provided, gentium-basic-italic.gz and
gentium-basic-regular.gz (see
here
for information about the Gentium typeface family).
font-directory.rkt provides a simple searchable font directory. Font
faces can be loaded into the directory at runtime.
font-render.rkt uses a dc<%> to render individual glyphs and
strings.
example.rkt draws a simple string to a Racket GUI window. It
produces output something like this:
(The yellow and green lines and the blue rectangles are to show the
various glyph metrics. They are not normally rendered when using
draw-glyph or draw-glyphs.)
racket-font is open-source software,
licensed under the very liberal MIT
license:
Copyright (c) 2011 Tony Garnock-Jones <tonygarnockjones@gmail.com>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy,
modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies
of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
The included Gentium fonts are Copyright (c) 2003-2008 SIL International (http://www.sil.org/), with Reserved Font Names "Gentium" and "SIL". They are licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.