From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Apr 24 2002 - 01:43:52 EDT
At 11:35 PM 4/23/02 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>It sure makes sense to me to take the Pango implementation and use it,
>so that AbiWord document selections won't work randomly differently
>than those in the dialogs and other widgetry. ;-)
Random differences, no. Of course. I hope we can continue to do at least
as good a job of leveraging existing sources of usable code as we have to
date. (I take a lot of pride in the fact that we've built so heavily on
proven XP codebases like expat, libwv, libpng, ispell, and many others.)
However, I simply don't know enough about Pango to have any opinion on
whether there should be *deliberate* differences or not.
I'm not going to try to speak for Tomas here. Since he's been the one doing
the bulk of our complex script support, his take on how much of Pango and/or
Freetype to use carries a ton of weight with me.
<aside type=curious>
What's the design sweet spot for Pango?
For example, the demands on a formatting engine (and its associated user
experience) can change a lot across the following spectrum:
- code editor with fixed-width fonts
- widgets with small rectangular chunks of text
- display-only formatting (such as a web browser)
- traditional word processing
- arbitrary page layout (more complex magazine/newspaper flows)
- full-on typographic control (a la Wired at it's best/worst)
I can easily imagine substantial differences across some of those
gradations. Specifically, the more text you're handling at once, the more
aggressive your undo globbing should arguably be.
</aside>
In short, differences certainly shouldn't be gratuitous, but I'm not totally
convinced that one size really does fit all across so wide a spectrum. It
very well might. I just don't know enough to tell either way.
That's why I keep trying to ask specific, intelligent questions.
Paul,
not i18n expert,
not by a long shot
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Apr 24 2002 - 01:44:08 EDT