Re: Possible Pango 1.4 ideas

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 09:35:42PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote: 
> It looks like most of these items (except for Kerning) involve
> PangoLayout. I think one of the most basic things that will have
> to be dealt with is how to implement them and not turn PangoLayout
> from barely-maintainable to unmaintainable.

Performance and memory usage also seems like an issue to me. We're
already sort of suboptimal here.

You and Owen have probably looked at it more, but as someone who used
to spent a lot of time with Quark and Pagemaker, those apps certainly
seemed to have substantially more complex text handling than
PangoLayout does right now; even AbiWord does, doesn't it? I'm kind of
skeptical that PangoLayout can handle their needs without becoming
noticeably higher-overhead and much harder to maintain (if only in
terms of sheer additional code size).

But then, I realize that maintaining PangoSuperDuperLayout alongside
PangoLayout isn't really attractive either.

Another thing I'd throw in: it doesn't seem easy to get a reasonable
API for a page layout or word processor app without having at least
one such app constantly trying to use the API and iterating things
based on that experience... how many Pango API changes/extensions did
we make for GtkTextView? I remember quite a few. And compared to these
complex apps GtkTextView is cake.

I guess I'm just saying "this project sounds challenging" ;-)

Havoc