Notes on using FreeType2 font rendering:


During the course of a morning I was able to get through the following on a
Solaris 2.x system.  Not having root priviledges, I downloaded and installed 
all of the following packages in my personal home directory.


Requirements:

You need a local copy of the FreeType2 library.  
You can get it from www.freetype.org or freetype.sourceforge.net.  I had to
download and build a recent version of gnu make before I could proceed.

You need your own copy of gd library 1.8.4 or higher, compiled with FreeType 
capability.  It is available from www.boutell.com/gd .   It will require
that you have local copies of libz, libpng, and libjpeg and the corresponding 
.h files.  To specify the freetype .h files I used -I/mydir/freetype-2.0.9/include
in the Makefile.

You need some TrueType .ttf font files, stored in a directory somewhere.  
You can find these on NT machines in c:\winnt\fonts or download them from the web.  


Compiling ploticus:

Compile ploticus with the GDFREETYPE flag turned on (see the Makefile), and
using the settings for GD18.  You will need to specify locations (-L) for all 
the above libraries and corresponding .h files (-I) if they are in non-standard 
locations.

If you have installed freetype library in a non-standard place like I did, you may
have problems with dynamic libraries not being found when you try to execute 
ploticus.  One solution is to move the freetype *so* files out of the way and 
then recompile ploticus, so that the linker uses the .a file rather than the 
dynamic libs.


Font names:

So that GD can find your ttf fonts, the environment variable GDFONTPATH must be 
set to a directory where TrueType (.ttf) font files reside.

Within the ploticus context, TrueType font names should be given without the 
.ttf extension, e.g. if you have a font file called times.ttf you would use the 
name 'times'.

