If you're familiar with the structure of modern Linux applications you may know that many rely upon GTK2. By implication this also often means:
Cairo (rendering), Pango (font layout and rendering), freetype (more font rendering), fontconfig (you guessed it). This includes most if not all gnome-based programs. KDE stuff doesn't use GTK, but there is some of this. Firefox will generally use GTK2, and applies here also. There are other variations (Gnash is in here somewhere). The problem here is that freetype and fontconfig are hopelessly complicated (although work very well in the right context), and not very well suited to RISC OS, and even for example you did a RISC OS backend for fontconfig (and a lot of hacking), I'm not sure the results would very satisfactory - it assumes its own font cache, X fonts and various crazy things. Freetype too has an immense API, which is mostly underutilised, and doing a RISC OS version would be hard (but not impossible). Fortunately, Cairo and Pango are a bit more sane, and have a more limited font interface (still somewhat complex), and already support different backends, allowing me to cut freetype and fontconfig out of the picture (mostly, some programs need a bit of education about assuming that they require them), and have hacked up dummy RISC OS backends for both. Probably I won't be doing anything further on this for a while, but I thought it helpful to outline the situation. Some of what I wrote above perhaps isn't 100% accurate, based upon my incomplete understanding, but I thought it useful to mention this as a starting point for referencing the situation or further work. -- Peter Naulls - [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.chocky.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- RISC OS Community Wiki - add your own content | http://www.riscos.info/ _______________________________________________ GCCSDK mailing list [email protected] Bugzilla: http://www.riscos.info/bugzilla/index.cgi List Info: http://www.riscos.info/mailman/listinfo/gcc Main Page: http://www.riscos.info/index.php/GCCSDK
