FreeType2 is great. I suppose. Spent way too many hours trying to get it to work in my fPic class. Fink had its wires crossed somehow, and while it said I had FT2, I didn’t (XCode was whining about some missing header files. Sure…). After fixing that problem, I dove right in, er…, about-faced, read the docs, went back to work. fPic can now draw text, given a valid .ttf file and sumshit like that.

Do I have to mention that after a coupla hours, the test sentence was Didier is an ass? Grrr…

Hacked the night away on an article for RBDeveloper which was, as usual, overdue, but less than usual… I have been playing in my column with graphics, trying to provide faster routines, or missing ones, or whatnot. This time, I am on the warpath, of sorts. I am building a Picture object from scratch, since it is missing for command-line applications. Part 1, which I sent off a few minutes ago, implements the framework and enough methods to be a good proof of concept. It can read and write JPEG files, and manipulate RGB bitmaps internally via a dynamic library I wrote for this purpose. The results are interesting so far, as I manage to speed up things quite a bit. Of course, the objective is twofold: speed is nice, but the ultimate goal is to provide an independent Picture class, dubbed fPic (f for fast , see?), that’ll enable us to manipulate graphics in command-line applications.