Re: Statically linking

[Raymond Wan <rwan cs mu oz au>]

Hi,

	First, thank you to both Sven and Ingo for replying to my message.
Ingo, I will try what you suggested the first chance I get.  But first, i
found this message and Ingo's reply very interesting.

On 4 Nov 2001, Sven Neumann wrote:
> Pango does a lot more than what you think it does, so it does make sense
> to use it. Have you ever tried to get bilingual or any arabic/indic/...
> text rendered correctly using FT2 alone?

	I agree with Sven's statements here.  While I have to admit that I
don't understand GTK's many parts very well, from what I do know about
pango, there does seem to be a lot of potential.  One problem with
some software nowadays is the lack of internationalization.  I would love
to see the day that I can install software written in any natural language
and have it work perfectly (provided I can understand the language :-) ).
So, I think packages like pango have a lot of potential.

	On the other hand, I really liked reading Ingo's original message
because it basically said what was going through my mind.  So that I don't
embarass myself in public, I did what Ingo did and that was to look
through the documentation to see what files I need or what environment
variables I need to set in order to fix my problem.  Unfortunately, I
couldn't find it and that could be because it doesn't exist or it isn't
indexed in such a way that it could be easily found.

	Of course, pango is still under development and no one expects
complete documentation.  What I'm working on is also in development and
the only documentation you get is a 0 byte README file :-).  However, even
though it is in development, I hope there will be some more documentation
/ tutorials for it, GTK+, GLIB, etc. to enable more people who aren't
developers to use it and therefore contribute to their development by
actively providing suggestions (or coding time, but realistically, I think
I'm a long way off to understanding it enough to contribute that much). 

	So, I definitely didn't mean anything bad about pango.  I do
respect the daunting task that it tries to do by merging fonts, etc. for
various natural languages.  I sent my original message to ask for help on
something that has been puzzling me...that's all.  :-)

	Thank you!

Ray