Help me, I want to draw true type fonts in a window

[Maxim Levitsky]

Maxim Levitsky wrote:
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>> Le mercredi 25 juin 2008 à 19:54 +0300, Maxim Levitsky a écrit :
>>
>>> Small, question just curios, is it possible to draw Unicode strings 
>>> with Cairo?
>>
>> Sure there is, there was an OO.o patch floating to switch OO.o's
>> rendering to cairo I think.
>>
>>> As I know gnome uses pango for text layouting (choosing which chars 
>>> to draw)
>>> Qt has its own text layouting.
>>
>> You won't escape pango (or its new incarnation harfbuzz). QT and GTK are
>> converging on harfbuzz, cairo uses pango behind, etc.
>>
>> Text rendering is approaching at last typographer requirements, which
>> means modern "smart" fonts are several orders of magnitude more complex
>> than old bitmap fonts (and people make use of the new features and
>> expect them to work). The code needed to interpret those fonts is
>> correspondingly more complex. In fact it's getting at the level of
>> complexity big projects are dropping their own text layouters fast and
>> pooling efforts around a common layouter stack. They can't keep up alone
>> anymore. (You have the same phenomenon on windows around uniscribe).
>>
>> If you think freetype or xft alone is sufficient nowadays, even for
>> latin-only text, you've already lost.
>>
>> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/TextLayout
>>
> My dream, is to have standalone font-rendering library which doesn't 
> depend on anything
> except maybe freetype.
> 
> Pango is still gnome specific, and drags in glib for example
> 
> Is there something like this.
Is harfbuzz what I need?

Best regards,
	Maxim Levitsky