From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Apr 25 2002 - 23:17:24 EDT
--- Tomas Frydrych <tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net>
wrote: >
> Hi Leonard,
>
> > >(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 need some internal mechanism for filling the font
> combo box
> with user readable names, and associating the font
> names in the
> combo box with a the descriptive data with the
> PangoFont objects;
> this should be straight forward. Pango itself takes
> care of the 'real'
> font management, it has a manager based on the xft
> library that
> maintains a database of fonts available through FT
> and also has a
> mechanism for automatic font substitution when the
> requested font
> is not available.
This is something AbiWord would need control over.
In general, it's a good thing but we don't want the
user to get something other than exactly what she
expects without us knowing ourselves right?
Also, does it do this on a character basis or a font
basis? MSWord, MSWordPad, and MSIE seem to map in
characters from another font when single characters
are missing from the requested font. This gets rid
of the square boxes/question marks for missing
characters but is not always what you want.
> It seems we would not need to directly interact with
> FreeType, the
> Pango low-level api makes it possible to take a
> string and get back
> a finished FT_Bitmap, which is better than I first
> thought, all we
> would need is for each platform to implement a
> function for drawing
> this bitmap on screen, everything else can be XP. PS
> output would
> be a bit more complicated, but at the same time,
> this would be an
> excellent oportunity to move it into the XP land.
Would it be possible to create a new Pango API
analagous to the one that returns the FT_Bitmap to
return PS. Don't we already have code that does most
of this which could be migrated into Pango?
> > >(6) replace the current shaping engine with
> Pango.
> > You tell us - that's your baby ;).
> I do not see this as a major problem, this is one
> thing that I am
> prepared to do the necessary work on -- as long as
> we can deal
> with the portability issues, we are in business. I
> have spent a better
> part of the day examining the low level API of
> Pango, and it does
> seems to provide all we need, and I think the
> changes would be
> transparent to all our layout classes above
> fp_TextRun (I can hear
> Martin sighing with relief :-)).
Woohoo (:
> > >(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?
>
> For each language Pango handles there is a module,
> at the
> moment there are modules for Hebrew, Arabic, Hangul,
> Indic, Tamil
> and Thai, plus a basic module that handles
> everything unhandled.
> Unfortunately, but logically, each of these modules
> requires a
> separate implementation of interface with each
> supported font
> backend. At the moment, the only modules which have
> the ft2
> implementation are Hebrew and Arabic. I have no idea
> how much
> work it would be to add this to the other modules,
> but suspect it
> would require familiarity with Pango, FreeType and
> the language in
> question. (I only had a closer look at the Hebrew
> module, and that
> looks good, Dov Grobgeld done some work on proper
> positioning of
> vowels, accents, etc.).
Those are all things I want to be familiar with (:
Andrew Dunbar.
> Tomas
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com
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