From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Apr 25 2002 - 22:45:21 EDT
--- Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@lazerware.com> wrote:
> At 4:30 PM +0100 4/25/02, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> >(1) Make glib 2.0 available on all our platforms
>
> According to other messages, it already builds on
> most (all?)
> of our Unix targets (including Mac OS X) and is well
> along for Win32.
> So the only questions would be QNX and BeOS.
>
>
> >(2) Make small changes to Pango to allow us to
> better control the
> >initialization of FreeType (about 10 LOC);
> hopefully we should be
> >able to get this into the official Pango tree.
>
> That sounds pretty easy...
>
>
> >(3) Get Pango to compile on all our platforms; this
> would require
> >some new code at least to load the FreeType
> library.
>
> Without looking at the Pango sources, I can't
> comment on what
> is required. Loading FT is XP - so I don't see the
> issue here...
>
>
> >(4) Get FreeType to compile on all our platforms;
> this should not be
> >a problem.
>
> Not an issue - it already builds on our all target
> platforms.
> One issue is that FT prefers to build with a custom
> version of Jam
> (though there are autoconf/make files for it) - so
> we'll have to see
> how it fits into our diving make system.
Am I right in believing we don't actually need to
build FreeType on platforms that already use the real
TrueType such as Windows and Mac? FreeType is an
exact reproduction of the TrueType APIs right? I also
think TrueType is probably faster than FreeType and
of course it has the patent on hinting which is
usually turned off in FreeType for legal reasons.
> >(5) Develop a new XP font manager (some, but not
> much platform
> >code needed), no complexities here, all we need to
> is to be able to
> >retrieve font names and associate them with their
> Pango
> >descriptions (not unlike the Unix font manager),
> probably from a
> >pregenerated text file.
>
> Why doesn't FT fit the bill here - or is there
> something that
> I am not understanding about what you mean by a
> "Font Manager"?
We'll be using Xft on *nix right? FreeType is just a
glyph renderer, not a Font Manager.
> >(6) replace the current shaping engine with Pango.
>
> You tell us - that's your baby ;).
>
>
> >(7) get the existing Pango language modules other
> than Hebrew
> >and Arabic to work with the FreeType back end. I
> have no idea how
> >much work this would be, but without it we would
> have only support
> >for Hebrew and Arabic, albeit much better than we
> have now.
>
> Not a clue here. How many modules? What's
> involved?
One per script system. We don't *have to* do them
all.
We can do them piecemeal as people need them and
native developers come to us. I'm not sure if the
Arabic module includes Farsi or not. There have been
Thai windows versions for a long time so I'd like to
support that. I'd also like to support Vietnamese
because it has the easiest to understand combining
characters. The Indian and Southeast Asian scripts
are always the hardest: Devanagari, Bengali, Khmer,
Burmese, Tibetan, Sinhala. Most of them don't have
much legacy support on computers.
Another thing I've been wondering about is that since
there is pangowin32, pangoft, and pangox, what would
be used on Mac and shouldn't there be pangomac that
used ATSUI or Mac's TrueType?
Andrew Dunbar.
> LDR
> --
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Leonard Rosenthol
> <mailto:leonardr@lazerware.com>
>
<http://www.lazerware.com>
=====
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