Re: Features needed for high-end DTP apps

[Zenaan Harkness <zen getsystems com>]

Damon Chaplin <damon kendo fsnet co uk> writes:
>>> And capitalization on a per-line bases. Eg. you might want the first
>>> line of a paragraph to be set with small-caps.
>> 
>> Yes, that should be added to the list. It sounds a bit tricky,
>> though.
>
>I guess the tricky thing is how to communicate to Pango, that you want
>something special to happen to a particular _line_. It sort of
>cross-cuts Pango's phases. Algorithmically, it isn't hard to do.

Just joining in on this discussion from a 2 months ago: does Pango
present a "paragraph" type structure to clients? If so is that where
something like "smallcap first line" or "smallcap first word" would go?

I guess I'm thinking in an XML sense here - I did 2.5 yrs of Docbook
authoring a few years back, and am returning to do some more for the
next couple of years, which led me to XML and XSL (new versions of
docbook are being written in this), and some attempts to test the
current state of output quality:

HTML is fine. PDF (and I guess PS) leave a little to be desired. So I've
been thinking for a solid two days now on doing a desktop DTP thing and
it's led me on to Display Ghostscript, and now Pango.

I did half a year of Pagemaker may be 7 or 8 years ago. So in my mind I
want to be able to do things like create text paths - beziers with nice
flowing text over the path, specify alpha/translucency for text,
antialiasing, printing, output to PDF/ PS.

I'll keep reading through the archives for now - I just joined an hour
ago and have been doing some scouring. Last night I got inspired on the
DTP thing to the point of listing the various views, basic objects
needed, things like layers that didn't exist when I used Pagemaker, etc.
If suitable I'll type it up and post it.

Thanks
Zen

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