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acat1433
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Font Driver
Timo Kreuzer had little difficulty getting the font driver to a working state on Windows XP, though more remains to be done before it will run on ReactOS. For his driver, Timo used the freetype font engine as a basis, but freetype uses a different hinting system than Windows. Font hints are used to help improve rendering to make text look nicer onscreen. As a consequence, while ReactOS will be able to actually use hints provided in font files once the font driver is merged in, fonts designed for use in Windows may look a bit blurry compared to fonts tailored to the freetype engine.
As mentioned above, development of the driver took place on Windows XP due to ReactOS missing the mechanisms to actually make use of the driver. Timo's Summer of Code project was limited to just producing the font driver, but he has also been working on getting ReactOS ready. Currently the driver loads and is also able to load font information into memory and creating a table to organize them. Realization, rendering of the glyphs into bitmaps, and a version of the TextOut function that can actually use the rendered glyphs are still missing. Realization involves querying the font driver for information about the font and font mapping, the linking a logical font to a physical font, the information received by the font driver plus some additional bits and pieces. Rendering of the glyphs is the responsibility of the driver, but the OS needs to provide some mechanisms to help manage the memory where the bitmaps are stored. For TextOut, please refer to newsletter issue 55 for an explanation of what is needed, along with a more detailed explanation of what a font engine requires. Completion of this work will likely take a few more months, though the font driver itself is effectively finished.
Thomas Krenn Open Source Promotion
During the LinuxTag convention in Germany, Matthias Kupfer registered the project for a contest run by server provider Thomas Krenn AG. The contest prize was money that can be put towards purchase of a server system from the company, and the ReactOS project ultimately placed 5th and has received 700EUR. The project intends to use the money to purchase a new build/test server, which will help alleviate the load on the current machines. The project would like to thank Thomas Krenn AG for running the contest and their support for the open source community.