I am almost certain that the X font interface offers no way of accessing
print metrics. AbiWord accesses the files directly, and to do so for
general fonts on the system, it would need to search X's font paths for
the files (which rarely exist, anyway).
I'm not sure what options are available here. I believe waiting for XFree
4.0 and general TrueType support might be necessary. Of course, I'm not
certain that will be enough...
> > The GNOME printing framework should have the same limitations.
>
> Arghhh...
That can probably be fixed, and this is something I had planned to explore
at a later point.
> > So it boils down to this: Do the Abi coders want to support two
> > different codebases for spelling on different architectures?
>
> We can abstract this into a library that takes care of it...
>
> ...UI differences? Well, if an abstraction library is used, there should
> not be problem...
AbiWord currently links against a modified ispell. It has more or less
been converted into a library, to avoid pipes. I can't remember the
interface functions we made up exactly, but it would be very easy to link
against a different spell checker, as long as it provided the 4 or so
functions we call.
> I think that it's extremely important to use what the architecture offers
> (see: Unix with ispell). But this is a "political" sorta thing...
Well, we are using ispell hash files. Of course, I think the current spell
check code should be replaced, as I don't think it's even remotely
maintainable. We need a standard, cross-platform solution, but I see no
reason why wrappers to additional, optional spell checkers can't be in the
code base eventually. We can probably make it a runtime option at some
point.
For unix, I figure a wrapper to a piped ispell and a wraper to aspell
would be good.
On Windows and other platforms, there might be standard word services
available that we want to provide interfaces for.
I think this stuff will happen eventually, but it will probably be a
version 2+ thing.
Justin