Pango and MathML

[Felix Breuer <felix fbreuer de>]

Hello!

The goal of Pango is to provide high-quality rendering of most human
languages/scripts. Mathematical formulas are a widely used script that
are not supported by Pango. GTKMathView is a library rendering
mathematics that are marked up in MathML quite nicely. It seems logical
to try to integrate these two.

The most straightforward way to do this seems to be the addition of a
new function to GTKMathView that returns a PangoLayout, which can then
be rendered by the Pango back-end as usual. I would like to know whether
this is theoretically possible.

What *is* a PangoLayout, actually? I.e. what are the implementation
details? A PangoLayout can obviously store various glyphs arranged in
some manner. Can a PL also store lines, such as a the line seperating
numerator and denominator of a fraction, or the line above a root?

Thanks,
Felix


-- 
Felix Breuer <felix fbreuer de>