On Wednesday 02 April 2003 08:38 am, Edward H Trager wrote: > OK, I have a few questions for Jungshik Shin, Edward Cherlin, > and/or anyone else on this list who can answer these (although > they may not be easy to answer): > > (1) Aside from the fact that Pango is written in C and > SILGraphite (OpenGraphite) is written in C++ (and this in > itself could lead to a flurry of opinions...), in your > opinion, which library, Pango or Graphite, appears to have a > better architectural foundation, or are they pretty similar?
That isn't the issue. Pango is a general-purpose system with generic support for each writing system, because its target is the general user who owns a computer. Graphite provides language-specific layout features within writing systems, because its targets include minority languages written in modified versions of majority writing systems. Languages of outback Thailand, Laos or Burma, for example, where the majority of computer work in the language is done elsewhere. The exceptional cases include the variants of Arabic script for languages of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, and of Devanagari for languages other than Sanskrit and Hindi in India. Graphite may be better than Pango in some of these cases. I don't know, and I would be glad to hear from SIL on these issues. Regardless of these details, we need a generic solution ASAP to support large chunks of commerce, government, and other uses, and we will need the more detailed solution in the future to support further uses. Both efforts are essential. > (2) If Pango is already fairly "mature" (quoting Jungshik), > then why are Daniel Glassey, Alan Ward, et all working on > SILGraphite instead? Same answer. > Is SILGraphite going to provide, or > already providing, something that Pango does not? Yes. > Or is this > just a case of one group initially working on Graphite for > Windows, and only later realizing the limitations of a > single-platform approach, while the other group of Owen Taylor > et al. were simultaneously working on Pango for Linux? Not exactly. Graphite for Linux has been long planned, but SIL started on Windows because that's what SIL has been using internally. > (3) If you had to choose between one or the other, which would > you use? Both, in some fashion. > (4) Is Pango going to become, if it is not already, the *de > facto* standard for complex script rendering in the OpenSource > world? "I don't know what the language of scientific programming will be ten years from now, but I do know that it will be called FORTRAN." Pango has the name recognition, but the two approaches will undoubtedly be brought together. > (5) What the heck is QT using ? > > I and a colleague are in the beginning stages of designing a > library which will we are considering building on top of > Pango. But, if Pango is not the right choice, or if > SILGraphite would be a better choice, then of course we want > to know that. It depends on your purpose and your target platform. > Since we don't want to be tied to a single GUI > toolkit, we assume that whatever QT provides is not really an > option. But, of course if someone were to tell me that QT's > solution is the best of the lot, then certainly I would take > the time to investigate it. Do that anyway, so that you know whether to ask the Pango and Graphite people for any of the QT features, but I expect QT's method to become a dead end. > On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Jungshik Shin wrote: > > Edward Cherlin wrote: > > >On Monday 31 March 2003 10:40 pm, Jungshik Shin wrote: > > >>Edward Cherlin wrote: > > >>>Have you looked at SILA? It uses SIL Graphite as the > > >>> renderer for Mozilla. > > >>> > > >>>http://sila.mozdev.org/ > > >> > > >>Yup. I'm aware of it. At least for now it's only for > > >> Windows, though. However, we may get some valuable > > >> insights from the project that can be applicatble to > > >> 'Mozilla-pango' marriage. > > > > > >I mean the part of the project that says they want to do a > > > Linux port of Graphite, and thus of SILA, but not much is > > > going on with it. > > > > A couple of issues: I guess OpenGraphite for Linux is not > > yet ready for the prime time > > while Pango is mature. SILA currently uses MS COM instead of > > xpcom. To make SILA for Linux, MS COM needs to be replaced > > by xpcom. We'll see which one gets there first, OpenGraphite > > or Pango. > > > > Jungshik -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
