[Inkscape-devel] Which font engine?

I am looking around for what might be a cause for <text> nodes not being rendered on Win32.

In FontFactory.cpp and FontInstance.cpp, there are numerous #ifdef switches between XFT and Win32. And any time we have different sets of code for different architectures, we have problems maintaining consistent functionality. And bugs that get fixed on one, often do not get fixed on the other.

Wouldn't it be better for us to drop the XFT/Win32 code, and use Freetype2? This level of abstraction means that we can let someone -else- worry about the machine dependent implementation. Or has this already been tried? Just a thought.

Bob