[cairo] Basic cairomm questions

[Ian Britten]

Carl Worth wrote:

>> - As a graphics library, I realize encodings and Unicode aren't
>>    really a big concern to Cairo, but is there any definitive
>>    approach to this?  Again, using the filename passed to the
>>    PdfSurface constructor, what encoding/codepage is that
>>    expected to be in?  Current runtime?  UTF8?  ISO-8859-1?
>>    [ All our text handling is in Unicode, so I'll need to
>>      address this issue anywhere I'm interfacing with relevant
>>      Cairo code. ]
> 
> This is an excellent question, and not cairomm-specific. You might
> actually want to raise this again in a separate thread with a
> descriptive subject for this issue. (I'm guessing that Owen, with his
> glib experience, might have some comments here.)

At some point, I probably will.  However, if there's currently no
definitive answer, I'll just make the appropriate assumptions.  I
have lots of bigger issues to pursue right now (Like getting stuff
to draw!  :) )
[ No worries - We use lots of 3rd-party libraries, and not many of
them yet address Unicode.  ]

> I don't recall what discussions/decisions we might have made on this
> topic in the past, but the functions that accept a string for a filename
> don't appear to have anything specific documented for them. (On Linux,
> it's easy to just say that the string is a byte sequence that will be
> handed to open(2), but we might want a better cross-platform story than
> that---I don't know.)

Understood.  It's what I had assumed.
[ NB - As a Cairo user, I would hope to use it in a platform
independent way.  Even though I am on Linux, if you someday say
that Cairo is Unicode-clean, I would (obviously) hope that that
would include Windows, etc too ]

>> Well, thanks for any info.  Keep up the great work!
> 
> I hope that's helpful, and thanks for your interest in cairo.

Pfft!  "Interest" is cheap/easy.  Thank *you* (And everyone else!)
for actually doing so much _work_ to make Cairo a reality!
Ian