Re: The future of GNOME.

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Kristoph A. Cichocki-Romanov wrote:
> 
> There is quite allot of independent application development going on,
> perhaps we should consolidate these projects to create components which
> could be used for a variety of applications. Take the lowly text positioning
> engine ( TPE ) - a word processor needs one, a PowerPoint clone needs one, a
> page layout application needs one ( heck, the GTK text widget could use
> one ) ... plus it would be useful for any number of other projects that
> place text on a page. If a TPE was designed and built outside of an
> application it could be used, as is, by a number of applications.
>

This is needed and will probably get worked on - we also have to solve the
"X fonts problem," which is roughly, they can't be rotated and they are
different from output-quality fonts. (and some minor things, like you
can't ask for "bold of the current font.") The gnome-print module includes
a bunch of this stuff, we also have a couple of nice libraries to do
hyphenation-justification (from Raph Levien) and context sensitive spell
checking (I think that's what it was) (Nat Friedman).

> One might even go so for as to suggest that a variety of components ( vector

We are doing this though, see the 'ezpaint' module from CVS. Much of the
PowerPoint initiative will be bringing ezpaint up to speed. There is
perhaps some tension between an engine for the very simple drawing of
PowerPoint or Excel vs. the more complex stuff of CorelDraw or Quark
XPress, but gwp, gnumeric, guppi, and achtung at least can use ezpaint.

libart_lgpl and the Gnome canvas are a vector engine in themselves,
though, just without some of the highlevel stuff.

All these things I mentioned can use more hackers though, feel free to
jump in or add new engines in your area of expertise. :-)

Havoc