Re: Hacktext availability

["Thomas J. Duck" <tomduck fizz phys dal ca>]

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Dear Owen,

     Thanks for your quick response.  I hope that you can appreciate that
I am trying to contribute, and have come to this list to see if I can get
some help with a problem that I have been struggling with for some time.
It's not like I'm a novice programmer.  The questions may sound dumb to
you, but there are many others struggling with the same problems (google
"gnomecanvas rotate text" if you like).

     I am a developer with the plplot project, and have recently written a
driver for it that can be used to imbed plots in Gnome applications.  I
have all of this working using gnome-print's Hacktext, but as Jody has
explained to me, moving to pango (if possible) would be best.

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Owen Taylor wrote:
> Pango supports shears. Pango handles bounding box rotations. Pango
> scales under zoom. I think you have some difficulty in your code.

     When I zoom in with GnomeCanvas, the text doesn't scale.  Maybe
pango supports scaling, but it's not happening for me on the Canvas,
although Hacktext scaling works fine.  There is no pango_matrix_shear
function to go along with pango_matrix_rotate et al (at least not in
Debian sid).  And, despite reading the available documentation and
searching the Web, I can't figure out how to fix this bounding box
problem.

     I would appreciate it if you could provide me with some pointers, and
have provided a code snippet to that end.  If I haven't given you enough
information, please let me know and I will elaborate where needed.

> >      BTW, I am surprised that pango isn't using libart for the matrix
> > calculations, considering that this is a Gnome project.  Needless
> > complication, no?
>
> Why would I pull in a moderately large, hard to use, scheduled-to-be-
> replaced library to avoid what ended up being 160 lines of code
> including documentation?

     Because standardization is good.  Libart is well documented, and I
have had no problems using it.  It would be better for the end-user
application developers like myself if you stuck with the standard until it
is replaced.

Sincerely,
Tom

- --
Thomas J. Duck <tomduck fizz phys dal ca>

  Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University,
    Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3H 3J5.
  Tel: (902)494-1456 | Fax: (902)494-5191 | Lab: (902)494-3813
  Web: http://aolab.phys.dal.ca/~tomduck/
  Public key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x17D965DB
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