Hi Martin,
it has been while I have looked at Pango; in principle I am all for, if
we could use a renderer so ambitious as Pango is, then it would
open doors for truly global Abi. The real issue is the feasibility of
integrating Pango with Abi. We have had a discussion on this
subject on the list about 6 month ago, and one of the points made
was that as great as Pango is, its API was inadequate for our
purposes at the time. The other issue is that the current AW layout
engine was designed without consideration that we may be using
languages that require specialised rendering and this makes
supplying context to the renderer more involved.
I think we should undertake a 'feasibility study' of using Pango with
AW. There is no question that it would require quite a bit of work,
but, more to the point, we should find out whether it is plausible
with the current Pango API, and if not, we should make a list of
issues that we would need resolved on the Pango side and submit
them to the Pango develoment team. Any issues that we might be
facing would be pretty much faced by any sophisticated layout
application, and so it would be in the interest of the Pango project
to deal with them -- this could be greatly benficial to both projects.
I would look into it, but I am currently pressed for time ...
Tomas
> Martin:
> Tomas and Andrew, have you looked at the Pango library which will be
> distributed as part of GTK 2.0?
>
> See http://www.pango.org
>
> Many people have been telling us that we should use this for genuine
> multi-lingual Word Processing. However this is not my area of expertise
> and so I would really appreciate comments you guys have on it.
