Pango: how to build a new rendering engine?

[Dominic Espinosa <jeevesn yahoo com>]

Hello all,

I'm a linguistics student, and as part of a 
research project I've devised a hypothetical new
script for certain phonetic applications. It's a novel
approach, and the standard  left-to-right sequential
rendering of characters as for English or European
languages is not going to work for rendering it
(although I experimented with kerning in the font).
The script resembles Korean Han-gul in that it works
by systematically combining certain graphic elements
into blocks. I have the glyphs stored in abritrary
order inside a TrueType UTF-8 font, although I realize
I'll need to address the encoding issue for real at
some point, and an input method is also being devised.
 
After a week of poring over the documentation and
source code for Pango, I'm still not sure how to
proceed in writing a module to render the script. I
have tried to analyze the source code for the Han-gul
module, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to
apply that to what I'm doing. I feel like I'm missing
a step in the font process. Can anyone point me
towards some documentation that describes the font
system on a lower level, or suggest a way to get
started? Using Pango to render text seems easy enough,
but building a new renderer seems like a less common
task. I have also been looking at the docs and mailing
list archives for Freetype2, but haven't found
anything of this sort.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Dominic Espinosa

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