Re: pango_layout_get_pixel_extents crash on Win32

[David Nečas (Yeti) <yeti physics muni cz>]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 05:12:05PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
>  - Your code assumes that the fonts for the Pango backend used on GTK+
> are the same as those for the FT2 backend ... true on X11, where both
> are using fontconfig. False on windows, where GTK+ uses the native
> font catalog and font system. Now, of course, using a font description
> that doesn't point to a known font shouldn't *crash*,

Should't I get either the requested font or a replacement
(possibly being awarded with a Pango warning)?

> but it's quite
> possible that your users have *no fonts at all* configured for the FT2
> backend, and at that point, it's more likely that there might be a
> crash.
> 
>  - Using FT2 on Windows is generally a poor idea.

Hm, I thought Gimp had been using FT2 so it could not be so
bad -- but maybe I was mistaken.  Anyway, if it's possible
that there are no fonts at all configured for FT2 then
obviously I cannot use it, at least not on Win32.

>  To render to an
> offscreen in-memory image, use cairo. With pango/cairo, you can render
> to offscreen images using the exact same font catalog that GTK+ is
> using, rather than dragging in an nonnative, innappropriate
> dependencies (FreeType/fontconfig).

I see.  The trouble is my application has still Gtk+ 2.6 as
the lowest supported version (and changing requirements in
a minor stable version is a bit unfortunate).

Does any safe off-screen text rendering method exist that
does not require Cairo?  I do not need much features, simple
strings with some default font would be sufficient.

Since I need off-screen text rendering only in a few places
I could also branch the code according to the platform, but
I'd rather avoid this too if there is another way...

Yeti

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