Re: canvas/pango/text

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 09:55:42AM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> hey gtk/gnome canvas crew - 
> 
> in gtk1.2/gnome1, the canvas' handling of text sucked, and the source
> and books about it admitted it quite openly. are things better in
> gnome2, or are the changes needed to use efficient client-side
> rendering for canvas text still pending?
> 
> just trying to do some mid-term design planning here ....
> 

Assuming you mean for the "antialiased" canvas? The whole AA canvas is
kind of hosed in libgnomecanvas 2, in fact a lot of people decided it
was a plain old bad idea and created a "foocanvas" module in CVS which
is sort of a revert of the canvas back to its pre-AA-mode days, then
nuking the canvas's dedicated scrolling and backing store in favor of
using GTK 2's built-in stuff. Gnumeric, Nautilus, etc. are now using
foocanvas.

Someone sort of half-rewrote all the AA stuff in libgnomecanvas 2 to
be based on some sort of generic GnomeCanvasShape and it is kind of
buggy as not much is using it. If you're relying on it what you may
want to do is take libgnomecanvas 1 and forward port to GTK 2, or at
least be prepared to do some fixage on libgnomecanvas 2.

However, on the plus side, yes client side text is much more
feasible/good these days. The ft2 Pango backend can render to a
client-side buffer.

Havoc