[cairo] Cairo and GdiPlus or two win32 backends

[Keith Packard]

Around 18 o'clock on Jan 16, Owen Taylor wrote:

> It might be possible to have multiple font backends around that could be
> mixed and matched with different surfaces. Any font on any surface.
> That wouldn't be that hard to implement from where the code is now.

That was the original cairo font vision; able to run the FreeType backend 
on any system for applications which needed font-driver specific knowledge 
but didn't have the resources to implement custom code for each platfrom.

> But the simplest thing, and what I'd like to try to start with is to
> simply have one font system for everything. That's how I've set up
> PangoCairo. It should allow a pretty rich set of operations ... text
> to images, text to paths, etc.

This is the basic requirement; if we can't make the font backend choice 
separate from all other choices, then this is what we'll end up with.

Right now, there's nothing preventing the use of FreeType on any system; 
performance on some platforms may suffer significantly, but it's hard
to imagine how we could get to a place where this won't work.

And, if we can't make the other font backends work on all surface types, 
then we'll have to fix whatever is broken in the rest of cairo to make it 
work -- having platform-specific font backends which support only a subset 
of the target surfaces would really be a bad result.

-keith


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