Pango portability (or rather the lack of it)

From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Wed Apr 24 2002 - 11:19:29 EDT

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    I have just downloaded the latest release of Pango (1.0.1) and it is
    not sufficiently portable, even leaving the glib dependence aside.

    Pango needs some kind of font back end, it supports X, xft, win32
    and FreeType2. Unfortunately, according to the docs:

        "Pangowin32 uses the Win32 GDI font API. Pangoft2 uses
         FreeType2. Neither one is even close to being as useable as
         the X11backend. They are buggy and slow, and print copious
         amounts of debugging output."

    Further, having looked into the the language module directories, it
    seems that only the Hebrew and Arabic modules can work with
    FreeType2, the remaining modules work only with X.

    So, the bottom line is that Pango only really works on Unix. Until
    this changes, it is not suitable for use in AW.

    Tomas

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