[cairo] GTKCairo development

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 6 May 2004 15:57:16 -0700, Bill Spitzak wrote:
> If there is an interface that says "this glyph may not draw if you have not 
> selected the right font" then we have the equivalent of code pages.

I appreciate the concern about asking for a glyph and getting
nothing. It's not good for a drawing library to do nothing when the user
asks it to draw something.

So, if the user asks for a glyph, and the current font doesn't have it,
I agree that cairo should draw something. I can imagine the support for
this including the ability to build a small font into cairo, as well as
code to draw little hex codes in boxes something like pango does.

But when you talk about pango never needing to select a font, or having
cairo automatically combine glyphs, then I think we're outside of the
scope of what cairo should do. Text layout is very complex, so I don't
see the use in pretending to provide a real implementation that only
covers a small subset of the required functionality.

Plus, I don't consider the text layout problem solved, so I don't want
to do anything to get in the way of people who want to work on solving
that problem in new ways.

You might claim that with this approach, that cairo will alwys be
inadequate, and we'll need a standard layer on top of it. If so, that's
fine with me. Cairo is not attempting to solve all problems itself --
just a few that we think we'll be able to solve well.

-Carl