Subject: Re: Interfaces [was: On rendering (Re: Pango will be a problem)]
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Thu Jan 04 2001 - 18:49:01 CST
At 12:10 AM +0100 1/5/01, Mike Nordell wrote:
>Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>> If enough changes can be made to Pango, it should work fine.
>
>"If", "enough changes", "can" and "it should" displays we shouldn't even
>think about this at the moment.
I don't believe that ANYONE was thinking about this till
after 1.0! Someone was commenting about future Pango support and I
made some comments on the topic...
>I agree, almost. It is mostly straightforward (though by no means simple
>:-) ), if your font renderer provides what you need. If not, it's simply
>impossible. Perhaps we could help those projects by displaying what
>interface(s) are needed to render formatted text?
>
The issue(s) have NOTHING to do with rendering - Pango does
an EXCELLENT job of rendering text using either native OS calls (X,
GDI) or FreeType including handling very complex Unicode issues (like
composite and alternate glyphs). It also handles RTL text, ligatures
and more. It's an amazing piece of work.
The problems lie in using it inside an environment like
AbiWord where you need certain extended controls. For example,
consider the simple case of page flow. As I said before, Pango
renders paragraphs - well, what happens when the paragraph to be
rendered spans a "page break". Pango knows NOTHING about pages -
only paragraphs (and therefore lines, words, etc.) and so it has no
way of knowing how to deal with such a concept. A harder case,
though by no means less important for Abi, is Pango's lack of
handling of "embedded objects". This would include anything from an
image, to a field. Pango ONLY knows from text.
LDR
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