Re: [Silgraphite-devel] Re: Pango and SILGraphite was Re: Possible Pango 1.4 ideas

[Martin_Hosken sil org]

Dear Frank,

>Paragraph
segment of Paragraph (directional runs)
String (several words)
Character
Glyph

The high level pango api really deal with the first two levels right?
FreeType2 deal with Glyph (and optionally Character) level .
Xft deal with both String level, Character level and Glyph level.
How about GDK/GTK? does it api deal with Paragraph level only?

>I think Graphite is really deal with Paragraph level. Althoguht I use it
as the  String level with Project SILA (see http://sila.mozdev.org). That
is really an incorrect use of Graphite. Too lazy to change the Mozilla arch
now.....  (and I am officially not working for Gecko now.... after spend 4+
years on hacking GFX....)

Graphite provides a solution to the segment of Paragraph level and provides
an optional, fallback solution to the paragraph level. The aim is to
improve the support that Graphite supplies to a paragraph layout engine
since Graphite is not really a paragraph engine in its own right. Paragraph
layout involves handling multiple runs of various fonts, directions, etc.
along with indents, etc. Graphite works well with such an engine (and we
intend to improve that support for high end paragraph layout), but it
doesn't claim to do all that work itself (it only supports a paragraph of
all one run). But as a solution to the segment problem it is one of the
best solutions out there (IMNHO :-)

Yours,
Martin Hosken