On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 00:41, bulia byak wrote:
- Sodipodi 0.33 can type Cyrillic characters in the text tool. Inkscape
cannot. Sodipodi also can display fancy chars such as em-dash (ctrl-u 2014), Inkscape cannot. I think this is due to all the Unicode new stuff in 0.33. We must have this too. Unfortunately it's quite big and complex and I'm not sure I can transfer this correctly. Any takers?
If it couldn't even do special characters (despite the unicode entry being present for a long time), it looks like font substitution only just got implemented in libnrtype.
The more I think about it, I think we really need to start migrating away from using libnr/libnrtype/libarikkei.
Otherwise we're in the unenviable position of being stuck with a dependency on strange and undocumented libraries whose sole upstream maintainer who has a history of being unresponsive and going AWOL for months at a time.
So, really I think our plan going forward should be:
1. purge libarikkei from the codebase
2. redo text handling/rendering using Pango over libnr somehow -- this either means figuring out a way to get laid-out glyph outlines from Pango, or implementing a libnr backend for Pango
3. (eventually) replace libnr with Cairo
Practical consideration: if we can pull off the Pango thing, we leapfrog Sodipodi in terms of our text handling.
-mental