--- Tomas Frydrych <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi Leonard, > > > >(5) Develop a new XP font manager (some, but not > much platform > > >code needed), no complexities here, all we need > to is to be able to > > >retrieve font names and associate them with their > Pango descriptions > > >(not unlike the Unix font manager), probably from > a pregenerated text > > >file. > > Why doesn't FT fit the bill here - or is there > something that > > I am not understanding about what you mean by a > "Font > > Manager"? > > We need some internal mechanism for filling the font > combo box > with user readable names, and associating the font > names in the > combo box with a the descriptive data with the > PangoFont objects; > this should be straight forward. Pango itself takes > care of the 'real' > font management, it has a manager based on the xft > library that > maintains a database of fonts available through FT > and also has a > mechanism for automatic font substitution when the > requested font > is not available.
This is something AbiWord would need control over. In general, it's a good thing but we don't want the user to get something other than exactly what she expects without us knowing ourselves right? Also, does it do this on a character basis or a font basis? MSWord, MSWordPad, and MSIE seem to map in characters from another font when single characters are missing from the requested font. This gets rid of the square boxes/question marks for missing characters but is not always what you want. > It seems we would not need to directly interact with > FreeType, the > Pango low-level api makes it possible to take a > string and get back > a finished FT_Bitmap, which is better than I first > thought, all we > would need is for each platform to implement a > function for drawing > this bitmap on screen, everything else can be XP. PS > output would > be a bit more complicated, but at the same time, > this would be an > excellent oportunity to move it into the XP land. Would it be possible to create a new Pango API analagous to the one that returns the FT_Bitmap to return PS. Don't we already have code that does most of this which could be migrated into Pango? > > >(6) replace the current shaping engine with > Pango. > > You tell us - that's your baby ;). > I do not see this as a major problem, this is one > thing that I am > prepared to do the necessary work on -- as long as > we can deal > with the portability issues, we are in business. I > have spent a better > part of the day examining the low level API of > Pango, and it does > seems to provide all we need, and I think the > changes would be > transparent to all our layout classes above > fp_TextRun (I can hear > Martin sighing with relief :-)). Woohoo (: > > >(7) get the existing Pango language modules other > than Hebrew > > >and Arabic to work with the FreeType back end. I > have no idea how > > >much work this would be, but without it we would > have only support > > >for Hebrew and Arabic, albeit much better than we > have now. > > > > Not a clue here. How many modules? What's > involved? > > For each language Pango handles there is a module, > at the > moment there are modules for Hebrew, Arabic, Hangul, > Indic, Tamil > and Thai, plus a basic module that handles > everything unhandled. > Unfortunately, but logically, each of these modules > requires a > separate implementation of interface with each > supported font > backend. At the moment, the only modules which have > the ft2 > implementation are Hebrew and Arabic. I have no idea > how much > work it would be to add this to the other modules, > but suspect it > would require familiarity with Pango, FreeType and > the language in > question. (I only had a closer look at the Hebrew > module, and that > looks good, Dov Grobgeld done some work on proper > positioning of > vowels, accents, etc.). Those are all things I want to be familiar with (: Andrew Dunbar. > Tomas ===== http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
