QuickFont

Hey guys, I've recently been working on FreeType bindings for .NET that are complete and have the look-and-feel of a managed .NET library, and I was wondering if you would consider switching the renderer from GDI+ to FreeType. If you don't know what FreeType is, it's a cross-platform library that reads font files and can render glyphs from them.

FreeType is automatically installed as a part of OS X, installed on most Linux distributions/available through the package manager, and can easily be compiled to a .dll on Windows. The only pitfall is it's use of the "long" type. Windows 64-bit forces longs to be 32 bits long, while all other major operating systems make longs 64 bits long on the 64-bit version. So right now you have to compile separately for Windows 64-bit support, but that mess can be avoided by compiling your application as "x86" instead of "Any CPU". Eventually I'll find a way to dynamically detect a Windows 64-bit system and swap the struct that I use for marshaling, but for now that's the solution.

My bindings are complete and mostly bug-free (haven't tested outlining, custom rasterizers, or the caching subsystem yet) and are available on github: https://github.com/Robmaister/SharpFont

There are a few discrepancies between the Mono and Microsoft implementations of GDI+ that cause some weird effects with certain fonts on Linux/OS X that would be fixed by using the only implementation of FreeType, you would get full Unicode support, be provided with proper metrics for right-to-left and vertical fonts, and use it's amazing outlining system.

Oh, and it's MIT licensed.

Thanks, and let me know if you want to use it. I can help you get started with FreeType. There's also an example available on the github page.

I added vertex buffer support to QuickFont, the fork is here -

https://github.com/swax/QuickFont

It has z support as well, but not rotation. Maybe someone would like to add that? :)