[cairo] Serious concerns about cairo

[Bill Spitzak]

Mike Emmel wrote:

> Add drawing operations at least for ucs2 chars. No one doing advanced text
> layout works with utf8 you can't internally.

I BEG TO DIFFER!

Please don't use "wide characters" in the api. The sooner we stamp this 
abonimation out, the better.

It really is not that hard to use UTF-8 in buffers. Finding the next 
glyph means looking for the next byte that does not start with 10. 
Certainly easier than finding the next word. And I really doubt your 
word processer does not have a find-the-next word function.

And think: do you *really* need the ability to jump to character N 
without first examining the N-1 characters before that. REALLY? I think 
you may be mistaken. Remember that you can store the offset IN BYTES 
from the start of any buffer in exactly the same amount of space as it 
takes to store the offset in "glyphs".

Another thing is that you seem to be ignoring "surrogate pairs". These 
basically mean that utf-16 is as hard or worse than utf-8 to handle, 
except the unusual cases are much more rare and thus the code will not 
get tested well.

And don't forget "combining characters". This means that if youre 
"advanced text layout" is thinking about glyphs at all, then you are 
screwing up.

Please don't dismiss UTF-8. We will all be much better off the sooner 
everybody switches to it.