Re: font renderers in gdk

[Christoph Toshok <toshok Hungry COM>]

> 
> Some more comments:
> 
> I'm not a GDK guy, but I am also very interested in improving GDK's font
> handling... I'm going to need something like this for GLUe anyway (in
> fact most of the forthcoming innovations in GDK (i.e. Imlib support)
> will be immediately useful to me).
> 
> It's important to me that the string-width functions are also allowed to
> return something a little more sophisticated than a simple integer. In
> fact, all measurements should be floating-point if possible. There
> should be mechanisms for getting kerning and ligature information if
> the font renderer is able to provide this.

agreed.  I've changed everything to floating point since the last mail
about phase and anti-aliasing.  As far as kerning and ligatures go, I
would think that should be handled all under the hood by the font
renderer, right?  Or do you want to be able to selectively turn off
kerning between certain pairs or certain ligatures?

> Eventually, I'm going to be working on a frontend to t1lib... if anyone
> else has already started doing this, then please let me know.  Perhaps
> I can help out.

I have started on a rough cut of one just to see whether gdk, with the
font renderer stuff in, would *work* with a different renderer.  But I
won't be taking it very far... just enough to make sure things will
work.

Chris