On Sun, 2003-12-21 at 04:58, bulia byak wrote:
Two practical questions:
- will Pango support kerning pairs? (currently they are ignored)
Yep. The lower-level interfaces (e.g. pango_ft2_font_get_kerning()) also provide kerning information.
- will it make it easier to implement (or even "for free") letterspacing?
Not sure ... Pango's text attributes map very neatly to CSS2, but letter-spacing is not one of the properties it includes by default (you can register your own custom attributes though).
For now with Pango we would have to implement both justification and letter-spacing ourselves, which is not the easiest thing in the world.
It's going to require quite a bit of research, and for someone here to become an expert on Pango (and probably work closely with the Pango team). But I think it's worth it.
In the meantime we could still use Pango in more basic ways.
Pango is not a simple library, but that is largely because the problems it solves are not simple problems. Long-term, our only two choices are to learn to use Pango, or rewrite it ourselves from scratch.
-mental