[cairo] User font API

[Peter Clifton]

On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 16:56 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 07:46 -0500, Peter Clifton wrote:
> > A slight distraction from profiling, I'm wondering if anything ever
> > became of the user font API discussed here (I don't see those API in
> > devhelp, so I guess not yet (at least not in 1.4.x):
> > 
> > http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2007-February/009539.html
> > 
> > Most of my rendering time was drawing lines which make up a font
> > internal to the CAD data I'm rendering. Having a feature to make up a
> > font at run time from this data would allow a graceful transition to
> > cairo rendering, without altering the appearance of any schematics users
> > have already made.
> > 
> > If it can't be done in cairo, perhaps I should be looking at whether I
> > can add fonts pragmatically from gschem's font data into pango. I'm
> > currently digging into the docs / source to see whether this is
> > possible.
> 
> No way to do it in Pango either.  My plan is to do user-font in cairo
> and make pango be able to use it.  I'll see if I can go back to
> finishing user-font sometime this holiday season.

Was there anything available I could look at, or was this just an API
proposal so far?

For some of our user base, depending on cairo will mean installing
cairo.. so its not out of the question that we depend on some patches
until this hits mainline. In any case, the gEDA (Electronics CAD)
development tries not to exclude users of older distros, with old
libraries as the user-base tends not to be on bleeding edge distro
releases.

I guess as long as the X server is new enough, it should be possible for
us to ship / insist people build cairo.

Best wishes,

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)