In a reaction to my forum thread [1] regarding our right to left rendering support I found out that SDL_TTF renders Arabic text badly. The main problem is that SDL_TTF seems to render every glyph separately where in Arabic it should be combined with the glyph next to it.
SDL_Pango [2] seems to solve the problem so I want to consider to use that library instead of SDL_TTF. The only problem with SDL_Pango is that is seems to be rather unmaintained, OTOH it's a wrapper library to Pango [3], which is used by several larger projects (part of GTK). So in the worst case we need to maintain SDL_Pango ourselves. Another advantage of Pango is that it already supports a minimal markup language, which allows us to use some formatting in WML as well. This markup language looks like html [4], where I think we should urge people only to use the 'Convenience tags' and not play with the fonts directly. I want to change my work in progress widget library to use SDL_Pango instead of SDL_TTF that way we can test with it and see how it works. Any objections against adding SDL_Pango or are there better alternatives anybody is aware of? [1] http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=21516 [2] http://sdlpango.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://www.pango.org/ [4] http://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/unstable/PangoMarkupFormat.html Regards, Mark de Wever aka Mordante/SkeletonCrew _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
