[cairo] rendering UTF8 text

[Kalle Vahlman]

2007/6/26, Ulrich Mierendorff <ulrich.mierendorff at gmx.net>:
> 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.

Ok, but that's another matter ;)

> > 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?

As far as I understand, it's "toy" API in the sense that it only
renders RTL (well, I guess LTR too in a sense...) languages (ie. not
vertical), doesn't do any kind of layouting (wrapping, justifying etc)
and so on.

But if your text rendering needs are limited to simple cases where it
will suffice to just output a string of letters, I guess using
show_text() will suffice. Not sure how the toy api handles different
encodings though...

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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