--- Tomas Frydrych <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote: > 
> If we decide to use Pango, we would need to, roughly
> in sequence:
> 
> (1) Make glib 2.0 available on all our platforms

Can you give us a rough idea what feautures or
specific functions from glib are required?  We may be
able to split out what is needed.  This would also
count toward "Draining the Swamp".

> (2) Make small changes to Pango to allow us to
> better control the 
> initialization of FreeType (about 10 LOC); hopefully
> we should be 
> able to get this into the official Pango tree.
> 
> (3) Get Pango to compile on all our platforms; this
> would require 
> some new code at least to load the FreeType library.
> 
> (4) Get FreeType to compile on all our platforms;
> this should not be 
> a problem.

I've been told it already compiles on all our
platforms.

> (5) Develop a new XP font manager (some, but not
> much platform 
> code needed), no complexities here, all we need to
> is to be able to 
> retrieve font names and associate them with their
> Pango 
> descriptions (not unlike the Unix font manager),
> probably from a 
> pregenerated text file.
> 
> (6) replace the current shaping engine with Pango.

What about keeping both like we have done so far with
the bidi/non-bidi builds?  It might take a while for
the Pango version to be useable for those not working
on the Pango-related stuff.

> (7) get the existing Pango language modules other
> than Hebrew 
> and Arabic to work with the FreeType back end. I
> have no idea how 
> much work this would be, but without it we would
> have only support 
> for Hebrew and Arabic, albeit much better than we
> have now.

I am extremely interested in working on this.  

> I would do (2) and (6) and contribute to (5); if we
> there are 
> volunteers to commit to (1), (3), (4) and (5), then
> I think it is worth a 
> try. Probably best to start with conditional
> compilation, because 
> there is no way of telling what the performance will
> be like.

Agreed.  I've been wanting to work on Pango for some
time but my old machine and Linux didn't get on well.

> I would appreciate feedback on whether people think
> we have the 
> resources to do this.

We should at least make a start.  I'm still unable to
guess when I might be active again sorry.

Andrew Dunbar.

> Tomas 

=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com

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