On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 12:27:32AM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
- Non-rectangular wrapping (<flowtext> element).
Richard is referring to http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/flow.html. The name `flowText' is actually from an older draft, but people still tend to use that word when discussing the facility.
Inkscape may well also implement
- The SVG spec requires that glyphs are output in logical order, not
visual order.
Richard is referring to http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/text.html#TextRenderingOrder
Richard speculates that this is probably so that z-order is correct for glyphs that overlap each other due to thick stroking or over-tight kerning/tracking.
(My initial suggestion was that it may be to facilitate conversion from e.g. postscript to text.)
I believe that there is a place for a library supporting advanced text applications, but that Pango Layout is not it. The overhead is really quite large and seems unnecessary for an API whose primary goal is laying out text in widgets.
Owen, can you comment on what you see as pango's scope? Are you interested in non-rectangular text regions? Are you interested in non-greedy line breaking? (I'd guess that non-greedy line breaking would be desirable even for dialog boxes, at least from a functional point of view; the only question is whether it justifies the cost in terms of maintainability of pango code and perhaps code size.)
pjrm.