[cairo] Need a Font Primer

[Travis Griggs]

On Aug 21, 2006, at 15:57, Nicolas George wrote:

> Le quartidi 4 fructidor, an CCXIV, Travis Griggs a écrit :
>> 2) I have some cases, where I want to select fonts for different
>> encodings. To display mixed language texts.
>
> ObPedantic: it is not correct to speak about different _encodings_  
> in this
> context. Cairo uses UTF-8, only UTF-8, and it covers  
> approximatively all the
> languages in the world.
>
> A correct term would be "script".

Thank you for the corrections. I like to get the terms right, and  
appreciate your gentle pushing me to get it right. :)

>
>>            For that, I'm going to
>> have to get comfy with FcPattern and pattern it looks like. Can
>> anyone point me to some sample code/tutorial/whatever that would
>> jumpstart figuring out what a common pattern is for doing this stuff.
>
> Are you sure you want to reinvent the wheel? If not, just use  
> Pango: it is
> slow, but it does a great work of merging fonts, and handling
> multidirectional scripts.

Hmm... So I looked at the link from the other post. I really am torn.  
Pango looks really cool. But it looks big too. What I'm doing is  
creating a language binding to Cairo for VisualWorks Smalltalk so  
that I can have nice pretty AA graphics under Linux/X11. To bind  
Pango, it looks like I get into another library just about as big, as  
well as Gnome stuff (I assume that's what GObject comes from). I  
liked the "one library" linkage simplicity when it was just Cairo.

The Cairo guys have been pretty helpful with language binding issues  
for Cairo; I assume because it's been done before. Are there "other  
language" bindings for Pango? Is there a "high level" view of the  
Pango stuff? The cairo guys pointed me to some presentation slides of  
Carl Worth's, as well as the sample code examples.

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
"I choose. Therefore, I Am"





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