[Cairo] Re: [xsvg] cairo_text_extents ?

[Bill Spitzak]

On Friday 05 December 2003 06:08 pm, Keith Packard wrote:

> Having spoken to the relevant toolkit authors, it's clear that the
> requirement is that font naming use the native platform mechanisms so that
> all applications running on the platform share the same fonts.  Having a
> separate naming scheme means that cairo applications will look different
> from applications using other rendering APIs.  This is unacceptable to the
> toolkit developers (Qt and Gtk+).

Okay, I think I was confused about this. I don't think anybody is interested 
in cross-platform calls to cairo_select_font, except maybe for a small 
built-in set like "sans", "fixed", etc. If machine 1 has the font 
"AvantGarde" and machine 2 does not, then obviously cairo_select_font 
interface is not cross-platform, even if everybody agreed to call that font 
the same way.

I am talking about a string that can be used on the *same* platform by 
multiple programs. I don't think it is acceptable that I have to use a 
device-specific interface when I only want to accept a font-name that I don't 
understand, and give it to cairo, and say "Cairo, you figure this out."

On all platforms I am familar with, fonts are identified by a string, and the 
first word in it is the typeface. So can we define that cairo_select_font 
takes a string in "native" format? That would get rid of the need to learn 
the device-specific interface for an awful lot of programs. If you 
accidentally feed this string to a different platform, cairo would use what 
it could and ignore the rest.

-- 
                   ,~,~,~,~ ~ ~ ~ ~
     /\_       _|_========___         Bill Spitzak
 ~~~/\/\\~~~~~~\____________/~~~~~~~~ spitzak at d2.com