[Cairo] Why not Xr?

[Justin Bradford]

I think I want to retract my previous concerns, since Keith's email about
platform specific functions for font selection pretty much ends the
problem, as far as I can tell.

As for a platform-independent "convenience" function for font selection,
some cross-platform libraries (like wx) let you pick a generic font
class for the times you don't care enough to write os-specific code,
like "serif", "sans serif", "monospaced", etc.

So perhaps cairo could have a similar set of font mappings. Every
platform would just have a list of specific font names/patterns for that
class. I suppose that doesn't help for non-western languages, though.

But this is a really general problem for cross-platform toolkits, and I
still don't think it's cairo's place to solve it. Unless there are some
really common cases which can be solved in a single, short source file, I
think platform specific only is ok.

Also, I had some questions on the rendering side of font handling.

I assume cairo_font is basically an interface with specific font backends
wrapping a FT_Face (is that the right term?) or LOGFONT, right?

And in the cairo_draw_text function, the specific backend implementation
gets the underlying specifics from the cairo_font wrapper?

So x11/cairo_draw_text looks like:

if (font->type() == "FT_Face") {
 FT_Face native_font = ((cairo_font_ftface_t*) font)->get_ftface();
 ...
} else {
 ...
}

And replace FT_Face with LOGFONT for the GDI+ backend?

What goes in the "else", though? Perhaps cairo_font has a generic render
function, too? So it becomes:

} else {
  font->render_generic(state, text, x, y);
}

And the render_generic function just draws the necessary paths on the
cairo_state or renders a bitmap and blits it onto the state? This would
let you do Freetype on Windows, or write a simple cross-platform font
format/renderer for testing purposes.

Postscript and similar backends just need a "get_glyph_outline" function
on the cairo_font which just returns paths, right? Some formats (like PDF,
I believe) allow embedded glyph info to have hinting and control points,
too (in the form of a t1, or opentype, or whatever format). Any way to do
this nicely? Perhaps a "get_glyph_outline_with_hints" and the backend has
to put it all back together in the right form for output?

Or is this all part of the plan already?

Justin