[Fribidi-discuss] fribidi & arabic shaping

[Tomas Frydrych]

> Besides, adding shaping
> to fribidi is reinventing the wheel as Pango which relies (relied?) on
> Fribidi already does it (and yes, Pango is toolkit independant, even
> though the fact gnome/gtk relies on it could mistake people into
> thinking otherwise).

Pango is not portable. The following is a quote from the 
README.win32 file:

"There are two Pango backends written for Win32: pangowin32 and
pangoft2. Pangowin32 uses the Win32 GDI font API. Pangoft2 uses
FreeType2. Neither one is even close to being as useable as the 
X11backend. They are buggy and slow, and print copious amounts 
of debugging output."

Pango really only works on X11, I need a shaping engine that will 
work well on win32, Mac, QNX and BeOS (the current AbiWord 
platforms), and, unfortunately, Pango is not the answer.

But otherwise I agree, FriBidi should do the bidi-layout only.

Tomas


> 
> > The other argument that could be put forth is that fribidi's
> > inclusion is difficult enough in most applications (try convincing a
> > application author of its inclusion and he/she will go into a rant
> > about it only catering to a very small minority of users and not
> > worth the headache).  To have those authors also consider a second
> > library would create more problems than it would solve when it comes
> > to getting it adopted.
> 
> Inclusion of pango in such cases would include in the same step
> fribidi. In any case, inclusion of two libraries amounts pretty much
> to inclusion of one, so if any author is open to inclusion of an
> additional library it wouldn't be a problem whether you are in fact
> talking about fribidi, pango or both. The linking process only
> requires indicating which libraries you're using, and there's no
> mention of libraries at the code level.
> 
> Salaam,
> Chahine
> 
> 
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