On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, [iso-8859-1] Andrew Dunbar wrote:
> > > > > 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.
> > >
> > > Since the new Gnome has Pango built in and used
> > > everywhere, how does gnomeprint cope in the new
> > > Gnome?
> >
> > I agree again. I don't know if printing has been
> > thought all the way
> > through. Someone remarked that pango next generation
> > would have a printing
> > component.
>
> Even without pango aren't we going to have the exact
> same problems between various font formats, the
> screen, and the printer? Shouldn't we even have such
> problems now? Do we have them now? How do we handle
> this now? Do we convert all glyphs to postscript and
> if so, why can't we just keep doing this?
>
Yes. Provided we have access to the font afm's we can do as well as we do
now with our own print-engine if we can find a sane map between
screen fonts and postscript fonts. However the issue of kerning has not
been adressed yet.
One hope I had for the next itteration of the code base was to fixup the
current unixfont mess. I think this is where freetype comes in.
Regarding anti-alaising, gtk 2.0 will do this for us in our drawing area
too.
(At Least I think so I haven't actually written a test program against gtk
2.0 to be sure.)
Cheers
Martin
