FreeType on osx

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

Simon Urbanek wrote:

On Mar 15, 2008, at 1:30 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

I'm trying to add FreeType support to rgl.  I see that there are
versions that ship with OSX, and also versions on DarwinPorts and
fink.
 What would be the recommended advice to users on this, and what would
a configure script need in order to find FreeType?

FreeType is a bit of a pain (I'll elaborate on that below). For CRAN
binaries of packages that use FreeType we use a static build instead
of the system one because those are too old. From a package's point of
view it's easy, though, because you only have to ask pkgconfig or
freetype-config. I wouldn't bother doing anything Mac-specific,
because both Tiger and Leopard have freetype-config, but their
versions are too old or buggy to bother.

On Linux, looking for freetype-config works, but that's not working
on  my OSX 10.4 laptop.

It should - do you have X11 on your PATH?

 Would it work in Leopard out of the box, or does a user need to
install FreeType explicitly?

Sort of - X11 in Leopard is broken out of the box, so you have to fix
that first, but once you do, it works. Both Tiger and Leopard come
with FreeType.

The real problem is that FreeType (even the last release) is somewhat
broken on OS X. It doesn't support system fonts properly. The CVS
version is a bit better, but still has a bug that causes font styles
to be mixed up. In addition, it is incompatible with the one shipped
in the OS. But anyhow, I don't think you should worry about all this
as a package maintainer - I'll have to sort those things out anyway
now that we use FreeType in R :).

Thanks, it was the lack of X11 in the path that was the problem for
detection, but now I'm seeing some bad glyphs.
I'm using FTGL as a wrapper for Freetype, so the problem might be there,
or it might be the broken Freetype.

I've seen that, and in all cases it was to do with which font freetype was 
told to use.

You could try to make sure that the Apple TrueType fonts (what Simon is 
calling 'system fonts') are used -- it seems that almost everything else 
gets used incorrectly on MacOS.  I'm not sure FTGL has support for those 
-- its demo hardcodes paths to .ttf fonts, for MacOS in a user area.

Finding suitable fonts is probably also a concern on Linux and other 
Unix-alikes.  There are some free ttf fonts available that you could ship: 
they are not as nice as the Apple ones, but they would provide a good 
platform-independent default.  (E.g. Liberation, mentioned in 
R-admin.texi.)  If you want a symbol font, you are going to be out of luck 
-- the only symbol fonts I know of are the Apple and Windows ones, and 
freetype does not use the Windows one correctly (or at least, no 
freetype-based program I have tried does, and it seems to do with the 
encoding).