Using Pango without FontConfig?

[Dave Crossland <dave lab6 com>]

Hi!

I'm working on the Open Font Library with Pierre Marchand, and the
Pango-based PNG-generating font preview system we have -
https://svn.openfontlibrary.org/public/openfontlibrary/gcfp/typesetter/PangoCairoFontPlayground.c
- is not working for font families with unusual family naming schemas
- because it depends on FontConfig.

I believe that the relevant feature request is already in the tracker
for a long time: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95043

And I guess that we ought to drop PangoCairoFontPlayground.c as today
it is essentially a simple version of pango-view.

To be clear about what I would like, pango-view currently works like this:

$ pango-view --output=a.png --text="123 Handshoveling spam? OH
nononono" --font="Junction" --height=500 --dpi=200

What I would like is to run it like this:

$ pango-view --output=a.png --text="123 Handshoveling spam? OH
nononono" --font-file="Junction.ttf" --height=500 --dpi=200

For that to work, Pango would need a patch to use a font directly,
without going via FontConfig.

(I also wonder if https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347237 is
related, the so-called "web fonts bug," and since webfonts are now
working well, I wonder how easy it will be to fix bug #95043 too :-)

Cheers
Dave