Re: A new font layer ??

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"Christopher John Fynn" <cfynn@dircon.co.uk> writes:

> > 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 X's fontset and font API seem way out of date when it comes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.

The is some momentum, I think, for extending X to have a better
font model. OpenType (possibly with Type1 outlines) seems like 
an attractive choice at this point, though I still have a
bunch of questions about how Indic scripts are handled within
the context of OpenType. Microsoft was supposed to release 
some specifications for how they are doing it this summer, but
I don't think that happened.

Regards,
                                        Owen