Re: 2.2 and 2.4 features?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM> writes:

> 2. Currently some applications make calls to Pango directly.  It might
>    be nicer if there were gtk wrapper functions so that applications 
>    didn't have to know if they were using Pango or not.  This way if
>    someone wants to hack gtk+ to use a different Font rendering engine,
>    it doesn't require changes in all Gnome applications.  Having said
>    this, Sun doesn't have any specific plans not to use Pango.  
>    However, it seems desirable to have such freedom.

While I don't think I need to beat on this topic any more, Pango is an
integral part of the GTK+-2.0 API, and if you want to avoid using
Pango, you need to avoid using GTK+ :-).

Any alternate font system that Sun wants to use would have to be
implemented as an alternate backend for Pango.

I certainly think that working on an alternate Pango backend would be
a waste of time ... Xft2 is very well suited to the needs of Pango,
powerful, and already in production use, but that's the layer at which
we have abstraction; GTK+ and GDK provide no abstraction of the use of
Pango, and will never do so.

Regards,
                                        Owen