Re: A new font layer ??

["Christopher John Fynn" <cfynn dircon co uk>]

> Now I'm very tired of contacting authors, who wrote GTK+ programs
> which use just gdk_font_load() and/or GtkFontSelection dialog.
> Such programs simply can't display CJK or iso-8859-N (n > 1)
> encoded text.
> They can be easily fixed, but it is just a pain to insert
> Cyrillic,
> Chinese, Korean, Japanese, ... font mappings into every
> applications's  C codes.

> How could we reduce the amount of this localization work?
>  Don't we need a new font API, which is quite different
> with X's one? (IMHO, X's font/fontset API is too compatible with
> the ancient X.) I hope remembering "Times" be sufficient to load
> appropriate font or fontset, according to each locales.

X's fontset and font API seem way out of date when it comes
to displaying multilingual text. This is going to become really
apparent with the release of Win2K and Mac OS 9 which have the underlying
features necessary to support all the scripts in the
ISO 10646 / Unicode BMP - including complex Indic scripts.

It's not enough just to find out the current locale and then
display the necessary version or code page of "Times" or
whatever that corresponds to that locale. The system has to
be capable of handling context sensitive character to glyph
mapping for complex scripts and so on.

- Chris