[Cairo] Text API proposal

[Carl Worth]

On Jul 29, Owen Taylor wrote:
 > The question of how you can use "Pango" and Cairo together on top
 > of something other than FreeType is indeed an interesting one
 > and one that needs to be handled if GTK+ is going to use Cairo
 > as it's rendering API.

When Keith and I came up with this API, we made the conscious decision
to export both fontconfig and Freetype interfaces. This is because I'm
lazy and dumb.

I'm too lazy to try to copy enough of Freetype's interfaces down into
Cairo. And I'm too dumb to know what pieces of that interface would be
essential to have in Cairo in order to abstract away Freetype.

So, I have two questions:

fontconfig
----------
Does anyone have a problem with Cairo exporting fontconfig as
proposed? fontconfig is quite portable and I, (speaking as a user),
would love to have a standard cross-platform means for naming fonts,
etc.

Freetype
--------
Does anyone have concrete suggestions for what API to push down into
Cairo in order to abstract away Freetype? If someone smart can
convince me to do that, and tell me how, I might be able to overcome
my laziness.

Or, another option is to give in to my laziness, not invent a new
interface, but declare that the Freetype API is good as is. With that,
we would just require the abstraction to happen below Cairo. That is,
if someone wants to use a non-Freetype renderer below Cairo, they
would have to write a Freetype-style wrapper above it for Cairo to use
and export. Does that make sense? Do such wrappers perhaps exist
already?

-Carl