Working on a simple page-layout app

[David Huggins-Daines <bn711 freenet carleton ca>]

I hope this isn't too premature... anyway, a while back (spurred by
some discussion on the Debian list) I started writing a rudimentary
"page layout" application (maybe "interactive visual PostScript
generator" is a more appropriately UNIX-like term?) as a project to
learn about GTK, X, and PS.

Tbe homepage for it (with a very ugly logo which I should not be
allowed to say was made with the GIMP) is at
http://aix2.uottawa.ca/~s1204672/glue/ - as it says, it's more a
statement of intent than anything.  Right now there is no GNOME stuff
at all in it - but I plan to, at the very least, implement a lot of the
user interface with libgnomeui, and use the GNOME internationalization,
vfs, and so on.

I'd appreciate comments, suggestions, offers of assistance, etc...
regarding what's on the web page and the code I've got so far (which is
avaliable on that page).  Particularly concerning user-interface stuff
(of which there is virtually none right now).

Also, (this is somewhat off-topic) I'm finding that the main stumbling
block to WYSIWYG-ness is font metrics... does anyone know of GPL/LGPL
code or a library for consistently measuring text in Type-1 fonts
across various dpi and point sizes?  Doing this myself involves
understanding .afm files, and that is not something that is within my
powers.

X's (and by extension GDK's) concept of how text should look does not
seem to bear any linear relation to Ghostscript's, even for the same
fonts and after compensating for the discrepancy between 72dpi
Postscript coords and 75/100dpi X displays, and so my page-view
zooming/dpi stuff is sort of broken when it comes to text... also, I
want to eventually implement all that fancy spacing and kerning crud.

Cheers

-- 
David Huggins-Daines
bn711@freenet.carleton.ca
http://aix2.uottawa.ca/~s1204672