Re: PangoXft and PangoFT2 patch from hell

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 11 o'clock on Nov 17, Owen Taylor wrote:

>  - Xft is being split into two pieces, one X dependent, one not.
>    The goal is to make the non-X piece useable for anybody that
>    needs a font configuration system. Getting this adopted
>    is really very important for the success of free software.

I'm busy working on this right now; I've got the libraries split apart and 
have added Unicode coverage to the font "names" so applications can find 
fonts with necessary glyphs.

The whole configuration library is less than 90K; not tiny, but somewhat 
smaller than other Gtk+ libraries.

The idea is to have a font configuration mechanism that is independent of X
and which doesn't force applications to use FreeType.  The library does use
FreeType internally to discover characteristics of fonts found in files,
but is otherwise agnostic.

I'm going to create a few additional APIs that will allow us to easily add 
fonts on the fly; either from files or from memory.

The new version of Xft is binary compatible with the current XFree86 
version so we should be able to slip this into most systems without any 
application changes at all.

It's all in CVS on my machine right now if anyone wants to take a look,
http://keithp.com has instructions.

keithp keithp com	 XFree86 Core Team		SuSE, Inc.