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

Behdad Esfahbod behdad at cs.toronto.edu
Thu Jan 5 08:53:18 PST 2006


On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Carl Worth wrote:

> 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?

How about making cairo use Pango? :)

> -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)).

That's in fact blocking on cairo as you can see here:

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313551

In particular, can we have this feature in the immediately next
cairo release?

  Need cairo_scaled_font_text_extents
  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5495


Thanks,

--behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
	-- Dan Bern, "New American Language"


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