From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Sat Jan 25 2003 - 12:03:05 EST
> > No; in the new gtk2 version AbiWord uses xft for
> > both rendering on screen and when creating PostScript
> > output. [on Pango] but gave up for now, due to
> > Pango portability issues.
>
> That is interesting: what "portability issues"
> were there? It even runs under windows and I wonder
> what problems arose for Unix-variants. Pango
> comes with a number of "shapers" for various
> exotic scripts and trying to double that work
> doesn't really seem like an ideal solution.
> I must be overlooking something, but it is not
> obvious to me. Maybe the problem is about font
> metrics which Pango may not be able to report
> in a way sufficient for AbiWord?
(1) Pango uses glib, so first of all, we would need glib on all our
platforms (mac, beos, qnx, win and unix); it is one thing to say that it
can be done (which I do not doubt), and another altogether for some
to do it on each of the platforms platform.
(2) As I realize you know, Pango comes in three flavours: X-based,
win32-based and ft2-based; obviously, we would have to use the ft2
based engine to get it working on all our platforms, which means
porting and distributing ft2; again, ft2 is ANSI compliant, but
someone would have to set up the make files, etc ...
(3) The last time I looked, most of the Pango shaping modules only
exist in the X-variant, the ft2 version could only do Hebrew and
Arabic. We do not need Pango to do Hebrew, because it is very
simple, and we could even offer reasonable support for Arabic, if we
could find and Arabic-speaking developer to debug what has
already been done.
The bottom line is that at present Pango is a real overkill for our
needs, and we would need to put in a huge amount of work to get
from it only little bit more than we can do now without it. I am sure
that this is going to change in the future, and that Pango will be the
way to go in the long term, but we do not have the resources to
spent on it at present.
Tomas
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