[cairo] Cairo with m17n-lib

[Carl Worth]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:31:05 -0700, Bill Spitzak wrote:
> One thing I would like to see is that the "toy" API at least be able to draw 
> ALL the glyphs in Unicode.

This would be certainly be convenient. Drawing nothing is never
helpful. And empty boxes aren't much better.

> 1. The toy api lets the user choose exactly one font. This font may define [...]
> 2. If that font defines a font-specific encoding that assigns a glyph to that [...]
> 3. Cairo also contains a hard-coded list of other fonts. Each of these are [...]

These all seem pretty reasonable to me. But I'm no expert here, so my
opinion is not worth much. I don't have any interest in duplicating
pango code, however. See more below.

> open-source bitmapped one, with hand-drawn versions of every single assigned 
> Unicode character, which is still better than nothing!

Does such a font exist today?

> 4. If nothing is found Cairo draws a box with the hex code inside it.

This one seems fairly easy, and if we do nothing else, we should
probably do this much.

> Pango should be able to take advantage of this lookup by Cairo so that it no 
> longer has to do the "which font" hashing. [...]
> Obviously this will require some of Pango's logic to be moved into 
> Cairo, but I think this can be kept minimal and would be a huge win for 
> everybody.

So that's the punchline I think. I'll leave it to the pango guys to
decide if they want to move this code into cairo and introduce a hard
dependency. If not, I don't think it belongs in cairo --- the toy API
doesn't seem worth that much code duplication to me.

-Carl