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

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 09:36:13 -0600, Mike Emmel wrote:
> On 1/5/06, Scott Robert Ladd <graphics at coyotegulch.com> wrote:
> >
> > However, when I try to display the same encoding using cairo_show_text,
> > I see a rectangle instead of the expected theta character:
> >
> >      cairo_show_text(drawing_cr, "\316\270");
> >
> > I am using the system font (Sans) in Cairo.
> >
> The system font in cairo does not have those glyphs.
> Pango uses a collection of fonts to meet the unicode requirements of a string.
> Mike

That's a correct assessment of the current implementation of
cairo_show_text---it uses glyphs only from a single font.

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?

-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)).
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