From: Hubert Figuiere (hub@nyorp.abisource.com)
Date: Sun Apr 28 2002 - 05:46:47 EDT
----- Forwarded message from owner-abiword-dev@abisource.com -----
To: "Tomas Frydrych" <tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net>
Cc: Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail@yahoo.com>, abiword-dev@abisource.com
Subject: Re: Pango?
References: <3CC57D83.4498.97D403@localhost> <3CC6A002.27673.7EFD25@localhost>
From: Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>
Date: 25 Apr 2002 23:48:41 -0400
In-Reply-To: <3CC6A002.27673.7EFD25@localhost>
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"Tomas Frydrych" <tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net> writes:
> > This means Xft on X too, right?
>
> No, FreeType is independent of any system font mechanism; it
> parses the font files and gives you the glyphs as bitmaps.
You really must use fontconfig on UNIX though to get the list of
available fonts, font names, etc. though. I don't think shipping a
custom set of fonts with AbiWord is really any good at all for users.
We're getting GTK, Qt, Mozilla, everything on fontconfig, please don't
create exceptions... things are such a mess right now and fontconfig
is such a good idea...
fontconfig doesn't make sense cross-platform though, using it is a GTK
frontend issue.
> No, I cannot :). But as far as I understand, Pango is a fairly high
> level formatter, it does something like our fl_BlockLayout class,
> and we would have to replace the blockLayout with it
> _to_get_most_out_of_it_. This basically means throwing our entire
> existing layout engine out and start again. It could well be the best
> thing to do right now, but I am not fully convinced.
I don't think you want to use Pango for layout, by any means. Well I
don't know AbiWord internals but I can't see how it would make sense.
PangoLayout is just intended for widget labels and GtkTextView.
> > Surely if pango can give us a shape
> > to print on the screen it can give us one to print on
> > a printer - but I don't know printers alas...
> Pango, if used in the way you envisage, only gives us a glyph
> indices, but even if it gave us actual shapes, this would be of no
> use for generating PostScrip. In the Unix World the fact we can
> draw it on screen does not mean we can print it via PostScript,
> because we could well be using non-PostScript fonts on the
> screen. Again, I am not saying there is a problem, merely that this
> issue has to be looked into, for being able to support a myriad of
> languages on screen is not enough in itself.
Owen could say better, but I think what's desired in Pango for
printing is essentially the same thing Pango does for the screen. The
general idea is that you want the same shaping and same font API for
printing that you have for screen display, right.
Havoc
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