[cairo] rendering UTF8 text

[Ulrich Mierendorff]

Kalle Vahlman schrieb:
> 2007/6/26, Ulrich Mierendorff <ulrich.mierendorff at gmx.net>:
>> Hi,
>> Thanks for the info, but pango has got much more dependencies:
>> libglib,libx11,libxrender,libxft,libfontconfig (I looked into my Ubuntu
>> package manager for the pango-dev to show up dependencies). This is
>> maybe a problem, especially for MS Win users.
>
> Pango depends on x11, render and xft only if those are compiled in.
> Otherwise running GTK+ apps on Windows would indeed be problematic
> (which it isn't really).
Ok, then I misunderstood this. But it is true that it depends on glib 
which depends on gettext which is GPLed. And the GPL is a problem for me 
and others.
>
> And the recommended ways of doing "serious" text rendering (ie.
> anything but simple labels) are to my understanding:
>  - Pango and the cairo backend
>  - Using the glyph API directly (and doing so re-implementing much of
> what pango already does well)
>
> The show_text() is commonly refferred to as the "toy" API, meaning
> that it won't really fullfill anything but the basic needs.
I do not understand exactly why this is a "toy" API. Are there any 
technical reasons?

Kind regards,
Ulrich Mierendorff