Fast scaled text

[Struan Bartlett <struan praguespringpeople org>]

I'm writing an application that needs to show high quality text being
zoomed-in or out fast. I prototyped this using the freetype library with
success. But I'd rather use GTK as I also need vector graphics and
scalable bitmaps.

The advantages of using the freetype library directly were twofold:

1.  with the right choice of function I could avoid the scaled font glyph
bitmaps being cached - as you may be able to imagine, if drawing at high
speed using a very large number of constantly changing font scales,
caching the font glyphs wastes memory and slows the process down;

2. I could scale the font with very high precision.

I've consulted the GTK documentation but have been having some trouble
interpreting what functions I would need to use to draw freetype text: a)
without glyph bitmap caching; and b) with the highest precision scaling
freetype allows.

Please can you help?

Best regds,

Struan.