Re: [Inkscape-devel] Proposal for New Subsystem Architecture (andNamespaces)
On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 23:07, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Pango - Conversion to Pango from libnrtype may be worth doing earlier than Cairo since the existing text system lacks many needed features, however this will need to be researched in more depth to determine the feasibility and cost/benefit. Unless a clear benefit is identified to performing the change early, we should conduct the change along with the Cairoification.
It might be relatively easy to begin Pango-ization by writing a Pango backend for libnrtype (which in turn would use either the Pango ft2 or win32 backends, depending on platform).
Two practical questions:
- will Pango support kerning pairs? (currently they are ignored)
- will it make it easier to implement (or even "for free") letterspacing?
If even one of these is true, I'd say go ahead! We need this urgent!
-mental << signature.asc >>
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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
MenTaLguY wrote:
For now with Pango we would have to implement both justification and letter-spacing ourselves, which is not the easiest thing in the world.
Actually, justification is something I know a lot about... I even sent bryce a demo of my implementation of optimal line breaking but I don't think he understood it :)
njh
On Sun, 2003-12-21 at 19:11, Nathan Hurst wrote:
Actually, justification is something I know a lot about... I even sent bryce a demo of my implementation of optimal line breaking but I don't think he understood it :)
Indeed... and indeed it looks like m y concern about the difficulty of implementing justification and letter-spacing was way overblown.
Looks like Pango will make most of the good stuff pretty easy ^_^
-mental
participants (3)
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bulia byak -
MenTaLguY -
Nathan Hurst