GScript is no longer quite vaporware

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

I've been coding away on a preliminary version
of the modular rendering system this week, and have
gotten to the point where there is a bit to look
at.

Version 0.1 of GScript is available from:

  http://www.labs.redhat.com/~otaylor/gscript/

Things that are pretty much working now include:

 - selection of rendering modules based on language
   tags and character ranges.

 - Dynamic loading of rendering modules.

 - bidirectional reordering. (Currently the supplied
   rendering module just knows how to draw 
   simple Hebrew, but the framework is general.)

 - basic rendering of a large part of the Unicode
   character set using font switching.

Things that still need work include (among many
other things):

 - Finalizing the API

 - Writing language-specific rendering modules

 - Beginning (and finishing) integration into GTK+. 

 - Debugging

The GScript library itself is pretty independent
of GTK+, but the distribution includes an example
program in GTK+ that reads in a file encoded
in UTF-8 and displays it in a scrolling window.

The big obstacle to compiling the current code
is that it requires a functioning implementation
of iconv(). The only one I know that works with
this code right now is the one in GNU Libc 2.1.

What I'm most interested in at this point are
comments on the interfaces and basic design...
the sooner we can finalize those, the sooner
we can move on to the fun stuff. :-)

Regards,
                                 Owen