[Fribidi-discuss] fribidi & arabic shaping

[Owen Taylor]

"Tomas Frydrych" <tomas at frydrych.uklinux.net> writes:

> > 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."

That's basically out of date; quite a bit of work has gone into both
the Win32 and FT2 since then and they are reasonable ususable at
this point... we expect to have an official release of GTK+ for
Win32 within a couple of months using the Win32 backend.

> 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.

Well, not yet.... but wouldn't it be easier to help add these
capabilities to Pango rather than starting for scratch? 
I'm not saying that Pango is the solution to everyone's layout
problems, but "Pango doesn't work on all platforms, therefore
I'm going to write something that does work on all platforms"
is just silly. "

Regards,
                                        Owen