[cairo] Need a Font Primer

[Nicolas George]

Le sextidi 6 fructidor, an CCXIV, Travis Griggs a écrit :
> 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.

The bottom line is that, if you want to go beyond western scripts, and
probably ideographic ones, you have to handle multidirectional text,
ligatures and glyphs reordering, and so on, and this is a very complex task.
Even if you understand all that must be done -- which, I must say, is not my
case -- actually doing it requires a lot of code, and the databases from
Unicode.

>							   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).

No, you are mistaken. GObject comes from GLib, a moderately-sized library of
useful functions for C: linked lists, hash tables, event loop, objects with
reference counting and messages, etc. Gnome uses GLib, and not the other way
'round.

>								 I  
> liked the "one library" linkage simplicity when it was just Cairo.

Alas, simplicity and linguistics do not go well together.

> 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?

There are a lot. You will probably not find them as "Pango binding" but as
part of Gtk+ bindings <URL: http://www.gtk.org/bindings.html >, because
Pango was primarily designed as a multilingual text rendering engine for
Gtk+, although it can be used independently.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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