[ft-announce] Announcing FreeType version 2.6.1

[Werner LEMBERG]

FreeType 2.6.1 has been released.

It is available from

    http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/freetype/

or

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetype/files/

The latter site also holds older versions of the FreeType library.

See below for the relevant snippet from the CHANGES file.

Enjoy!


   Werner


PS: Downloads from  savannah.nongnu.org  will redirect to your nearest
    mirror site.   Files on  mirrors may  be subject to  a replication
    delay   of   up   to   24   hours.   In   case   of  problems  use
    http://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases/


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http://www.freetype.org


FreeType 2  is a software  font engine that  is designed to  be small,
efficient,  highly   customizable,  and  portable   while  capable  of
producing high-quality output (glyph images) of most vector and bitmap
font formats.

Note that  FreeType 2 is  a font service  and doesn't provide  APIs to
perform higher-level features, like text layout or graphics processing
(e.g.,  colored  text  rendering,  `hollowing',  etc.).   However,  it
greatly simplifies these tasks by providing a simple, easy to use, and
uniform interface to access the content of font files.

FreeType  2  is  released  under  two open-source  licenses:  our  own
BSD-like FreeType  License and the  GPL.  It can  thus be used  by any
kind of projects, be they proprietary or not.


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CHANGES BETWEEN 2.6 and 2.6.1

  I. IMPORTANT BUG FIXES

    - It turned  out that for CFFs  only the advance widths  should be
      taken from the  `htmx' table, not the side  bearings.  This bug,
      introduced in  version 2.6.0, makes  it necessary to  upgrade if
      you are using  CFFs; otherwise, you get cropped  glyphs with GUI
      interfaces like GTK or Qt.

    - Accessing Type 42 fonts returned  incorrect results if the glyph
      order of the embedded TrueType font differs from the glyph order
      of the Type 42 charstrings table.


  II. IMPORTANT CHANGES

    - The header  file layout  has been  changed (again),  moving  all
      header files except `ft2build.h' into a subdirectory tree.

      Doing so  reduces the  possibility of  header file  name clashes
      (e.g., FTGL's  `FTGlyph.h' with FreeType's `ftglyph.h')  on case
      insensitive file systems like Mac OS X or Windows.

      Applications  that  use  (a)  the  `freetype-config'  script  or
      FreeType's `freetype2.pc' file for pkg-config to get the include
      directory  for the  compiler,  and (b)  the  documented way  for
      header inclusion like

        #include <ft2build.h>
        #include FT_FREETYPE_H
        ...

      don't need any change to the source code.

    - Simple access  to named instances  in GX variation fonts  is now
      available (in addition to the  previous method via FreeType's MM
      interface).   In  the `FT_Face'  structure,  bits  16-30 of  the
      `face_index' field hold the current named instance index for the
      given face  index, and bits  16-30 of `style_flags'  contain the
      number of  instances for  the given face  index.  `FT_Open_Face'
      and friends also understand the  extended bits of the face index
      parameter.

      You need to enable  TT_CONFIG_OPTION_GX_VAR_SUPPORT for this new
      feature.  Otherwise, bits  16-30 of the two fields  are zero (or
      are ignored).

    - Lao script support has been added to the auto-hinter.


  III. MISCELLANEOUS

    - The auto-hinter's Arabic script support has been enhanced.

    - Superscript-like and  subscript-like glyphs  as used  by various
      phonetic alphabets like the IPA  are now better supported by the
      auto-hinter.

    - The TrueType bytecode interpreter now runs slightly faster.

    - Improved support for builds with cmake.

    - The  function  `FT_CeilFix'  now   always  rounds  towards  plus
      infinity.

    - The  function  `FT_FloorFix'  now always  rounds  towards  minus
      infinity.

    - A  new load  flag `FT_LOAD_COMPUTE_METRICS'  has been  added; it
      makes FreeType  ignore pre-computed  metrics, as needed  by font
      validating  or  font  editing  programs.  Right  now,  only  the
      TrueType  module supports  it  to ignore  data  from the  `hdmx'
      table.

    - Another round of bug fixes  to better handle broken fonts, found
      by Kostya Serebryany <address@hidden>.