Re: Possible Pango 1.4 ideas

[Matthias Clasen <maclas gmx de>]

On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 02:49, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail yahoo com> writes:
> 
> > > > But I think you could still do text on a path
> > > within an application.
> > > > You could translate the coordinates returned by
> > > Pango and render the
> > > > text yourself.
> > > 
> > > Rotated baselines is very high on the Pango request
> > > list:
> > > 
> > >  - It's needed to do vertical text the way I want to
> > > do vertical text
> > >  - It comes up in a lot of apps (gnumeric needs it,
> > > for instance)
> > 
> > Wouldn't it make more sense to allow arbitrary 2D
> > transformations of the character space?  This is
> > surely
> > going to be needed at some point anyway for paths.
> > It will definitely be needed when we want to do both
> > scaling and rotating of the same letter.
> 
> Well, if by "arbitrary 2D transformations" you mean affine
> transformations like Postscript, that ends up being:
> 
>  - Rotations
>  - Scales - It's not clear to me that having a scale
>    factor separate from point size is a good idea;
>    certainly adds more confusion.
>  - Shears - Utterly useless
> 
> I don't think you need anything but rotation for doing text
> along paths.

I would think that for proper text along paths, you'll need not only
affines, but projectives, so that you can map rectangular boxes to
arbitrary quadriliterals. If we're going for matrices anyway...(but of
course, the division is nasty, performance-wise).

Matthias