questions for a page layout program

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

Some of you already know I've been considering writing a high-end
page layout program using/for gnome.

Such a program will need far more than the X Window font system can
provide, so I'd have to write a font toolkit.  That's not too
bad since I've done it before, but others are already looking
at doing the same.

So I could either
(1) write a canvas item to display text and let me select it,
    and hope that I won't have to throw too much away

(2) use pango in some way (?)

(3) wait and see what emerges, maybe contributing to a new font
    infrastructure.

You can see a few design ideas at http://www.holoet/~liam/glayout/
if you're interested.  I am tending towards choice (3) here.
Option (2) would probably be taking the pango text editing code and
making a version that rendered text in a shaped outline in a 
non-rectangular canvas item, with support for the line-breaking,
hyphenation and ligature features I need.

Lauris' ideas sound very promising, although I am concerned about
copyright protection for fonts.  But maybe that's somewhere I
can help too.

So the question is, am I sensible in waiting?

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam@holoweb.net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh on irc.sorcery.net http://valinor.sorcery.net/
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999
Forthcoming: The Open Source XML Database Toolkit