[cairo] Separating Cairo from Fontconfig

[Keith Packard]

Around 9 o'clock on Nov 1, Ned Konz wrote:

> I can't tell at a glance whether fontconfig is actually necessary for the 
> operation of libcairo if there was no toy API and every font were opened 
> using the cairo_ft_font_create_for_ft_face() routine. It seems like it 
> shouldn't be, as Freetype2 itself does caching and can provide lots of 
> information about a face.

The existing FreeType backend for cairo uses Fontconfig and FreeType as
essentially a single entity.  In a file-based environment, FreeType isn't 
a sufficient library for presenting and selecting fonts.

We can adapt this to a file-less environment in two ways:

 1)	Adapt fontconfig to manage in-memory font objects, and
	eliminate its dependence on persistent mutable storage.

 2)	Produce another FreeType-based font backend for cairo which doesn't
	use Fontconfig.

cairo itself is designed to support multiple font backends to match the 
native font system of the target environment, so either of these 
techniques would be essentially independent of the core cairo 
implementation.

-keith


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