Possible Pango 1.4 ideas

[Damon Chaplin <damon karuna uklinux net>]

Hi,

I noticed the discussions on gtk-devel about GTK+ 2.4 plans, so I
wondered if we should try to get some better layout features into Pango
for the next release. Quite a few people seem interested in using Pango
for DTP or printing now!

I'm going to work on these (practically full-time):

 o Hyphenation.
 o Justification.
 o Tab stops - left/center/right alignment, fill characters,
   aligning on specific characters.
 o Underlines - word-underline (only underlines characters,
   not whitespace), and squiggly red underlines, for spelling errors.
 o Displaying invisible chars, like spaces, tabs, paragraph terminators.
 o Drop capitals.
 o Small caps for first n lines of paragraph.
 o Kerning - customizable kerning for particular character pairs.
 o Tracking - customizable for particular paragraphs.
 o Runarounds & shaped text boxes - would need to cooperate with
   higher-level code to determine where text can be placed on each line.
 o Leading - locking to a baseline grid.

I think that lot should make it possible to produce fairly decent
word-processor/DTP apps (if we can get printing working as well!).

TeX-like hyphenation & justification is well underway (it works but
there are lots of bits to sort out). And compared to those, the others
are a doddle.

We don't have to make a decision now, though - if I can get a reasonable
patch ready by May/June we can decide then. But it's something to bear
in mind.

Damon