Re: [gnome-print] Re: Pango and gnome-print different world view of font files

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

dov imagic weizmann ac il writes:

> On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 12:31:15PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > [stuff deleted]
> >
> > If the gnome-print people don't make sure that fontmatch meets
> > there needs, and don't migrate to it when it is done, well,
> > that will be a serious missed opportunity for GNOME.
> 
> It appears to me that gnome-print must go further than just being
> compatible with the fonts, but must also use the ft2 renders in order
> to get the glyph list with kerning information. Otherwise all the 
> efforts being put into the rendering modules will not be available 
> when printing.

Integration between gnome-print in Pango and gnome-print at a deep
level is a different issue than the shallow issue of using the same
font database. Using the same font database is necessary, and gives
significant benefits by itself, but no, it doesn't give a common API
or give the internationalization capabilities of Pango to gnome-print.

Unfortunately, Lauris andI never found the time to settle the issues
and come up with a font API for Pango that gnome-print could just
use. So, integration is theoretically possible with the gnome-print
APIs, but its a bit clumsy, and still hasn't been implemented in
practice :-(

(I suspect that a separate set of shapers is needed for gnome-print,
but perhaps if gnome-print-2.0 is using FreeType for all font loading
the FT2 shapers could be used, at least as a first approximation.)

Regards,
                                        Owen