Subject: On rendering (Re: Pango will be a problem)
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Thu Jan 04 2001 - 14:39:16 CST
> Have you informed Pango developers about these limitations? I
think they will
> be willing to provide this functionality (or at least won't mind about
> inclusion of code that adresses these issues).
>
I suspect that this is actually not going to be at all easy even if
they are willing. Rendering text that uses formating is not all
straight forward, and certainly it is not possible to simply replace
normal text drawing routines with one's that use a rendering
engine. Just to illustrate this with a trivial example, say that 'abcd'
is a word in a language X, which also stipulates that b and d at the
end of a word have to be rendered as B and D. Now say that the
user decides to make c bold. Thus in AW 'abcd' would become 3
runs, each calling the GUI toolkit to draw itself, and this is where
we get into trouble. How should the engine draw 'ab'? If the GUI
treats 'ab' as a word we will get 'aBcD', and if it does not, we will
get 'abcd', both of which are wrong; we need abcD. So the GUI
engine needs to give you some way of passing context information,
which may not be that easy to generalize since different languages
may require entirely different way of handling. And even if you get a
good interface to the GUI, you will have to rework the existing run
handling to work that information out. I fully agree with Leonard,
this is going to be far from trivial.
Tomas
*********************************************
tomas@frydrych.net / www.frydrych.net
PGP keys: http://www.frydrych.net/contact.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Jan 04 2001 - 14:44:15 CST