[cairo] GTKCairo development
Owen Taylor
otaylor at redhat.com
Tue May 4 13:42:52 PDT 2004
On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 16:26, Bill Spitzak wrote:
> I think a *killer* feature (one that will make Cairo instantly preferrable to
> every other graphics interface) would be to hide "font sets" inside it. My
> proposal is simple: when you select a font you are guaranteed that you will
> get 2^32 possible glyphs, and that you will get equivalent Unicode coverage
> no matter what font you choose. This will remove the need for Pango to switch
> fonts, for it to figure out what glyphs exist, and eliminate any need for any
> interface to indicate what glyphs exist, thus simplifying both Pango and
> Cairo. More importantly it will mean there will be reasonable compatability
> between programs using Pango and programs using something else, the glyphs
> will at least match, even if the positioning is wrong.
Have you thought about:
Metrics: What do you report for the metrics for this "combined font".
Is it always going to have a huge descent because it contains
Arabic somewhere in there?
Language tagging: when creating fontsets you want to prefer the fonts
that have all the characters of the language of the text.
OpenType and other layout tables: Fonts aren't just collections of
glyphs, they also have other tables that determine how these
fonts interact. (Ligatures, substitutions, etc.)
Integration with native font systems: On Windows, Pango works on top
of Uniscribe. Uniscribe needs the individual fonts.
Combining accents: If I have LATIN SMALL LETTER A followed by
COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT, how do I select the font that doesn't
have COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT but has LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE
It's a really complex area; there's no way you can isolate Pango from
the fontset selection process and get good results.
Regards,
Owen
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/attachments/20040504/3df1399a/attachment.pgp
More information about the cairo
mailing list