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<div class="date">
07/08 2019
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9.99
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1.0
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Bye Bye BDFs
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<p>Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format is no more, as the creators of
<a href="https://pango.org">Pango</a>, one of the most widely used text rendering
libraries,
<a href="https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-directions/">announced</a>
their plans for Pango 1.44.</p>
<p>Until recently, Pango used FreeType to draw fonts. They will be moving over
to <a href="https://harfbuzz.org">Harfbuzz</a>, an evolution of FreeType.</p>
<p><em>Why?</em></p>
<p>In short, FreeType was hard to work with. It required complex logic, and
provided no advantage over Harfbuzz (other than being able to fetch
opentype metrics with ease).</p>
<p>Upgrading to Pango v1.44 will break your GTK applications (if you use a
<code>bdf</code>/<code>pcf</code> bitmap font). Harfbuzz <em>does</em> support bitmap-only OpenType fonts,
<code>otb</code>s. Convert your existing fonts over to <code>otb</code>s using
<a href="https://fontforge.github.io">FontForge</a>. It is to be noted that applications
such as <code>xterm</code> and <code>rxvt</code> use <code>xft</code> (X FreeType) to render fonts, and will
remain unaffected by the update.</p>
<p>Both <a href="https://github.com/nerdypepper/scientifica">scientifica</a> and
<a href="https://github.com/nerdypepper/curie">curie</a> will soon ship with bitmap-only
OpenType font formats.</p>
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