[cairo] cairo for 3D game/vision/graphics/simulation engine - practical questions

[Ralph Giles]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 12:23 AM, max<max at iceminds.com> wrote:

>  We need to add text support to our 3D graphics application,
>  and vector graphics would be an nice option to support too.
>  We have a few practical startup/newbie questions before we
>  make a final decision to adopt cairo/pango/freetype2, which
>  presumably is what we need to render text string images to
>  memory that is in fact a texture-map image.

Note that you only need pango if you want to support complex scripts,
and it has the most dependencies. If you just need support for
(simple, not book-level) Latin and CJK text freetype alone is enough.
You'll need to implement your own glyph cache for reasonable
performance, but one can do this just by saving each
font+glyphid+size+subpixel offset result to a texture subimage and
caching the texture coords to use in drawing with it.

>  What IS the absolute minimum set of dependencies possible?
>  I would assume that's what we want, since we want nothing
>  but memory images (no PNG, no PDF, no SVG, no DirectX,
>  no xlib-pixmaps, no nothing (perhaps DIB is "memory"???).

If you want vector support, then you do need cairo, pixman and
freetype. Disabling everything but the image back end will help with
the footprint.

HTH,
 -r