Displaying Formatted Text

[Jay Bloodworth <jay dokodiner com>]

The array of options for displaying and editting formatted text is
overwhelming me, and I would like some advice on which to choose.

I am in the market for a widget that can display multiple lines of text
with arbitrary font changes throughout.  It needs to support selections
and editing, although there is no need to change the font of a piece of
text after it has been displayed.  It would be nice is the widget could
handle word wrap itself.  It would be even nicer if it could handle
embedded pictures and flow text around them, though I'm mostly resigned
that I'll probably have to hack that in myself.

I know there is GtkText in standard gtk1.2.  I've looked at the
GtkExText widget that comes with one or more of the wordpad-esque
editors (I forget which one(s)).  Gal seems to contain an incomplete
canvas item for handling multiline text.  If I wanted to homebrew, the
API spec for gnome-print mentions that it includes text layout code, but
I've heard that functionality is moving to Pango.

I'm certainly willing to look through some source to try and grok some
of these items further, but would appreciate any pointers the gurus can
give me about what is considered the Right Thing for text formatting in
Gnome these days.  In particular pointers to info on extant font
handling and text formatting APIs would be appreciated - gnome-print
docs are awfully scarce.

TIA,
Jay