Having it next to AbstractShaper didn't make sense, as there's various
use cases where font features are specified but the caller code doesn't
even know there's any shaper involved. Such as in the UI library.
In basically all cases it's two independent operations so forcing them
to be done together doesn't really bring any potential efficiency
advantages. On the other hand, splitting them allows allows the caller
to better make use of available memory, as the new
renderGlyphQuadsInto() allows the input and output arrays to be aliased.
Bumping AbstractFont plugin interface versions as this is a breaking
change.
Empty input was asserting originally, but such strict behavior doesn't
seem to be useful in practice as all application code would need to
explicitly make sure that shape() isn't called if the input or the input
range is empty. In particular, I hit this assert as soon as I rebuilt
and ran magnum-player, and the assertion didn't really uncover any bug
or make anything better by firing.
Treating zero glyph output as a failure also isn't good -- rendering
for example a string of whitespace may also result in zero glyphs on the
output, which isn't a failure. Plus it's currently unclear what should
actually be a failure -- neither FreeType nor HarfBuzz really have a
concept of the shaping operation failing, hb_shape() returns void -- so
special-casing glyphCount() being zero as a failure just doesn't make
sense.
This thus means the doScript(), doLanguage() and doDirection()
implementations are now called always, regardless of whether shape() was
called at all, or whether it produced any glyphs. This allows the shaper
for example to give back a detected script etc even if the actual
input range to shape was empty.
Replaces the previous, grossly inefficient AbstractLayouter which was
performing one virtual call per glyph (!). It's now also reusable,
meaning it doesn't need to be allocated anew for every new shaped text,
and it no longer requires each and every font plugin to implement the
same redundant glyph data fetching from the glyph cache, scaling etc. --
all that is meant to be done by the users of AbstractShaper, i.e.
Renderer. The independency on a glyph cache theorerically also means it
can be used for a completely different, non-texture-based way to render
text (such as direct path drawing directly on the GPU), although I won't
be exploring that path now.
It also exposes an interface for specifying script, language,
direction and typographic features. Such interface will be currently
only implemented in HarfBuzz, but that's the intent -- to provide a
flexible enough interface to support all possible use cases that a font
or a font plugin may support, instead of exposing a least common
denominator and then having no easy way to shape a text in a non-Latin
script or use a fancy OpenType feature the chosen font has.
The old public interface is preserved for backwards compatibility,
marked as deprecated, however the virtual APIs are not, as supporting
that would be too nasty. I don't think any user code ever implemented a
font plugin so this should be okay.
To ensure smooth transition with no regressions, the Renderer class and
MagnumFont tests still use the old API in this commit, and their test
pass the same way as they did before (except for two removed MagnumFont
test cases which tested errors that are now an assertion in the
deprecated layout() API and thus cannot be tested from the plugin
anymore). Porting them away from the deprecated API will be done in
separate commits.
Vladimír Vondruš