Re: Pango-1.0.0 released

[Arnaud Le Taillanter <arnaud lt free fr>]

Owen Taylor wrote:

> 
> Pango is designed to be modular; the core Pango layout can be used
> with four different font backends:

I miss a documentation on the Pango design/rationale.
What choices were made, what the rationale is, what other APIs have
been explored (NT, Apple, IBM, QT), what the differences are. How the
code is modularized.  What is working. What is not. What critics the
Pango designers have received on their design. Why they think the design
will cover the needs. What concessions had to be made etc...
For example, in the font API, I wonder why in a core i18n library I find
references to typical western font properties: PangoStyle is NORMAL,
ITALIC or OBLIQUE. PangoVariant is NORMAL or SMALL_CAPS.
> 
>  - Core X windowing system fonts
>  - Client-side fonts on X using the Xft library
>  - Direct rendering of scalable fonts using the FreeType library
>  - Native fonts on Microsoft backends
> 
> Dynamically loaded modules then handle text layout for particular
> combinations of script and font backend. Pango-1.0.0 ships with a wide
> selection of modules, including modules for Hebrew, Arabic, Hangul, 
> Thai, and a number of Indic scripts. Virtually all of the world's major 
> scripts are supported.


Even more interesting: what is not supported. Are there some scripts
that can't be supported. What are the biggest problems encountered to
date. Todo. Bugs. 

> 
> More information about Pango is available from http://www.pango.org/.

This site is never updated. Last status report is from november 2000...

Thank you,

Arnaud

> 
> Special thanks to:
> 
> Robert Brady (Indic shapers), Hans Breuer (Windows backend), Matthias
> Clasen (Documentation), Sivaraj Doddannan (Tamil shaper), Dov Grobgeld
> (Hebrew shaper), Karl Koehler (Arabic shaper), Alex Larsson (FreeType
> and Windows backends), Tor Lillqvist (FreeType and Windows backends),
> Changwoo Ryu (Hangul shaper), Havoc Pennington, Roozbeh Pournader
> (Arabic shaper), Chookij Vanatham (Hebrew shaper), to Keith Packard,
> for Xft, and to the authors of the FriBidi library.
> 
> Thanks to all Pango contributors, including:
> 
> Darin Adler, Martin Baulig, Frank Belew, Jacob Berkman, Dennis Björklund, 
> Jonathan Blandford, Ross Campbell, Anders Carlsson, Arnaud Charlet, 
> Erwann Chenede, Abel Cheung, Dennis Dementiev, Miroslaw Dobrzanski-Neumann, 
> Jens Finke, Martin Gansser, Tony Graham, Raja R Harinath, Adrian Havill, 
> James Henstridge, ChiDeok Hwang, Tim Janik, Michael Jansson, 
> KUSANO Takayuki, Elliot Lee, Raph Levien, Evan Martin, Toshio MARUYAMA, 
> Paolo Molaro, Arjan J. Molenaar, Michael Natterer, Sven Neumann, 
> Padraig O'Briain, Gediminas Paulauskas, Laszlo Peter, Joshua Pritikin, 
> Soeren Sandmann, Pablo Saratxaga, Manish Singh, HideToshi Tajima, 
> Raymond Wan, Richard Warren, Sebastian Wilhelmi, Matt Wilson
>