Re: Displaying Formatted Text

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>]

It depends, whether you need WYSIWYG or not.
If not, you should use Gtktext, GtkExText or EText (from gal), possibly
enhanching it accoring to your needs, and be prepared to replace it with
wholy Pangoized text widget for 2.0.
If you need WYSIWYG, you have currently to do custom widget yourself.
You just have to use:
1) AA Canvas and GnomeFonts (not X fonts)
2) Printing through glyphlists (the plain text printing is poor solution
   and cannot guarantee you anything but visible text in future). If you
   need some specific interfaces to GnomeFonts and/or glyphlists, I will be
   glad to help you.

Lauris

On 04 Dec 2000 22:57:21 -0500, Jay Bloodworth wrote:
> 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.