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

[Stuart Parmenter]

On 1/5/06, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs.toronto.edu> wrote:
> 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? :)

I was hoping to avoid entering this thread, but making cairo depend on
Pango is a bad idea.  As nice as Pango is, it isn't the right solution
for all situations.  While yes, Pango works on Windows, there is a
good chance that you are going to want to use Uniscribe and friends
directly instead.  Last I checked, Pango doesn't work at all on Mac
where ATSUI rules the land.  Pango also isn't covered by the same
licenses as cairo which would probably make it harder as well.

In Mozilla, for fonts we're going to be using Pango on unix platforms,
Uniscribe directly on Windows and ATSUI on Mac.  We will be using
cairo on all platforms.

I think cairo's font and text APIs are more-or-less at the right level
now and I don't think adding more text handling to cairo is the right
solution.  I think that the current Pango calls are easy enough for
people using Pango... maybe pango could add a pango_cairo_cairo_text()
function that just does the 4 lines of code that Owen posted earlier.