[cairo] About cairo_show_text and UTF-8...

[Mike Emmel]

On 1/5/06, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs.toronto.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Carl Worth wrote:
>
> > I'd be glad to see cairo_show_text improved to get glyphs from
> > multiple fonts in order to provide better glyph coverage. But this
> > work has not been done yet.
> >
> > Any volunteers?
>
> How about making cairo use Pango? :)
>
I started on a project I called demontic
Which is the simplified egyptian writing system :)
Anyway what its is is pango stripped down to just the fontconfig support and
with gobject removal. Basically its the guts of pango.

I've not had time to work on it much but I think thats the type of library your
looking for.

Mike

> > -Carl
> >
> > PS. With systems that use fontconfig, the results should be quite
> > good, as it already provides a sorted list of "best match" fonts. So
> > it's basically just a matter a noticing that the current font doesn't
> > include the glyph of interest, then marching down the list until the
> > glyph is found. (And one final step would be to draw _something_ when
> > the glyph is not available in any font. This could be the "missing
> > glyph" glyph from a font, or something like the hex boxes that pango
> > once had (and may soon/now have again)).
>
> That's in fact blocking on cairo as you can see here:
>
>   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313551
>
> In particular, can we have this feature in the immediately next
> cairo release?
>
>   Need cairo_scaled_font_text_extents
>   https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5495
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> --behdad
> http://behdad.org/
>
> "Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
>         -- Dan Bern, "New American Language"
>