Gnome text subsystems

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ariman ee>]

Hello,

What about following logical structure?

1. User has
- text (in some supported encoding)
- language

2. Given language and preferences, he/she or system selects available
GnomeFont

3. It gives text + font + language to Pango, and gets back PangoGlyhString
(or list of strings)

4. These strings are fed to:
- gnome->X font finder, then X font rendering
- canvas engine
- raster rendering engine
- outline extracting
- gnome-print
...

Problems:
- if text is in multiple languages, then single GnomeFont is not
sufficent. So there should be something bigger, like GnomeFontSet
- How to deal with attributed text?
- How complicated text is Pango able to layout - i.e. if should it handle
super/subscripts, possible hyphenations, multiple languages, multiple font
sizes and attributes in single text segment?

Suggestions?

Lauris