Rendering fonts in Go

[Yuliana Zigangirova]

Hi everyone!

I am looking for a best way to render fonts like TTF and Type 1 in my Go programm.  I have looked at the Freetype port into Go, but it is incomplete (Type1 are not implemented) and also lacks some feature like setting text matrix (or at least I have not found how to do it).  I have also looked at different graphic libraries  like Gio, but am still not competely sure how fonts are rendered there.  Seems like they are using  github.com/srwiley/rasterx,  am I correct?  Is it a wrapper to Freetype or a completely undependent font renderer?  I am also not sure about the quality of  glyph rendering there, will it be good enough for printing? 

So I will be grateful for any comments about the package named above and also about other possible ways to render fonts in Go.  May be I am missing something obvious.

Thank you very much in advance,

Yuliana

[Howard C. Shaw III]

I think Freetype may still be your best bet - but rather than the Freetype port, you would need to use a wrapper that calls the Freetype C library, such as https://github.com/danielgatis/go-freetype

[Egon]

There's also https://github.com/go-text/typesetting and github.com/go-text/render.

But, I'm not sure whether it covers your needs.

[Yuliana Zigangirova]

Thank you, I will have a look.  I have hoped on finding pure Go,

but may be it is unrealistic.

[Brian Candler]

At worst, it may possible to compile C into Go. It sounds mad, but I believe SQLite has been ported to pure Go this way.

https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/sqlite
https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/855271867162083329?lang=en
https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/QDEczMhlQBU/m/4lCn2kP0AwAJ
https://github.com/elliotchance/c2go

[Jan Mercl]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2024 at 12:34 PM 'Brian Candler' via golang-nuts
<golan...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> At worst, it may possible to compile C into Go. It sounds mad, but I believe SQLite has been ported to pure Go this way.

Challenge accepted: https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/libfreetype