Re: Possible Pango 1.4 ideas

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca pacaterie u-psud fr> writes:

> [*] ie., I've not measured it, just seen GtkTextView in action... but I
> don't how representative is GtkTextView 

Quick timing is that GtkTextView is about 14 times as fast as
AbiWord 0.99.4 at laying out text. (Yeah, it's an old copy
of AbiWord, but what I had available to try on the machine
where I was doing the timing.)

You might claim that AbiWord has to do more, but I don't think
that's really the case. GtkTextView/Pango has a pretty 
sophisticated model of how characters can interact, and how
styles can be applied to them, and that's really the slow part.

As I recall last time I profiled Pango, the biggest chunk of time was
spent selecting the glyphs and getting their sizes.

Regards,
                                        Owen

Note - this is, of course, completely the wrong approach 
 to getting optimization patches out of people. I should,
 of course, say "I really wish I knew how to make Pango
 as fast Abiword."