[Cairo] Text API proposal

[Thorsten Behrens]

Yesterday, Carl wrote:

> 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.
>
If I got Owen right, he plans something like that (or what should
CairoWin32Font stand for?).

> 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.
>
No idea about that. How about an API that deals exactly with the
functionality needed by Cairo? Makes porter's life much more easy.

Generally speaking, I have the impression that we're theorizing here. The
thing Cairo will benefit the most are actual ports to Windows and OSX.
Only then, potential issues will show up. From what we can tell, the Cairo
glyph interface will not suffice for Windows. If Owen got Pango working
with Uniscribe and a glyph API, all the better (would be interesting, how
broad test coverage for that version has been, though).

Just some 2 cents again,

-- 

Thorsten

"Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded
their reinvention." [Larry Wall]