Re: Documentation on creating a Pango module

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Emil Soleyman-Zomalan <emil79 uclink berkeley edu> writes:

> On Wed Jan 23, 2002 at 07:39:58PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> : 
> : Unfortunately, there is no documentation on writing modules. :-(.
> : 
> : I would expect Syriac modules to follow the pattern of Arabic fairly
> : closely, but certainly the Arabic modules are by no means the simplest
> : code. 
> : 
> : The Thai module was originally written to be a nice simple example,
> : but then people actually fixed it to be useable for displaying Thai...
> : 
> : If you have particular questions, I'd be more than happy to answer
> : them on this list.
> 
> Hi Owen,
> 
> Looking through the various modules, I see that most of the languages
> have two sets of files - e.g. hebrew-x.c and hebrew-xft.c
> 
> I'm guessing that the Xft named file incorporates XFree86's Xft subsystem 
> for providing font information to the client into its core, but what then 
> is the function of the other file? Is it for those systems that are not using 
> Xft?

Mostly that, yes. (Also - Xft didn't exist when I started Pango and for
some languages we have bitmaps, but not decent TTF fonts.)
 
> Do you recommend coding for both sets or just Xft?

I would consider Xft more important in the long run, and it has the important
advantage that you can use a Unicode based encoding and use OpenType
for the glyph variants, rather than having to make up some Syriac
specific glyph encoding. (Assuming you have OpenType Syriac fonts to
work with.)

Regards,
                                        Owen