[R-SIG-Mac] FreeType on osx

[Duncan Murdoch]

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.

Duncan Murdoch