Build freetype locally

[longtran2904]

Overview

• Update to the latest version (2.13.3)
• Add support for OTF files
• Only build and include necessary files
• Add a build script: build_freetype.bat

Details

FreeType is configured and built following this video. The old 4coder build only included the font driver for TTF fonts (truetype.c). I’ve added an additional driver for OTF fonts (cff.c). After that, you need to include a renderer to rasterize the glyphs. For this, I use the smooth.c renderer.

• src/truetype/truetype.c needs sfnt.c and psnames.c
• src/cff/cff.c needs sfnt.c, psaux.c, and psnames.c. INSTALL.ANY says pshinter.c is required and doesn't mention psaux.c. This is incorrect. The latter is mandatory, while the former is only needed for hinting. I include both.
• All the source folders (src/cff/, src/psaux/, src/truetype/, etc.) are copied as-is, except that I removed all mk files. The only exception is src/base/, where I deleted several unnecessary files.

You need to put all these source folders inside non-source/foreign/freetype2/src/. Next to the src directory, add the freetype folder copied from freetype-x.x.x/include/freetype. This folder contains all the header files required to use the library.

The ft2build.h, long_ftmodule.h, and long_ftoption.h files are configured the same way as shown in the previous video. The main difference from the old 4coder setup is that I disable file stream support that relies on the CRT by defining FT_CONFIG_OPTION_DISABLE_STREAM_SUPPORT. As a result, FT_New_Face cannot be used—you must use FT_Open_Face instead. If you don’t want this behavior, simply comment out the #define.

[Jack-Punter]

I assume you have just included all of freetype here? Thats a lot of files added, do we need all of them? can we just keep the ones were actually using?
I also presume this could help resolve the issue mentioned in #18 where our existing shared-lib is specifcally for x86 so we fail to link on arm macs?

[longtran2904]

I assume you have just included all of freetype here?

Surprisingly, no. If you look at the src folder, I only included the 8 folders that are actually required. Last I checked (which was a while ago), the full FreeType source contained 27 folders. It may be possible to trim a few more files from freetype2/freetype, but I haven’t tried that yet.

If you care so much about the number of files, you could always just include only the prebuilt binaries (in the x86 and x64 folders).

I also presume this could help resolve the issue mentioned in #18 where our existing shared-lib is specifcally for x86 so we fail to link on arm macs?

I haven’t personally built it on macOS, but the process should be similar. Most likely, porting build_freetype.bat should be enough. If you want to learn more about the build pipeline, I wrote this simple guide a while ago.