[Gnome-print] Re: Gnome text subsystems

[Nathan Hurst <njh hawthorn csse monash edu au>]

On Sun, 28 May 2000, Owen Taylor wrote:

> How far that goes - I don't know. That is, does someone use
> PangoLayout to render bird-shaped paragraphs with drop caps, and
> global paragraph optimization? I'm not sure. I don't want to try to
> make the basic PangoLayout complex enough for anything anybody would
> ever want to do.

I can do that all now.  Not just dropcaps either, embeded shaped diagrams,
in realtime :-)

> Right now, I would lean toward the latter. It would require saving
> a bit more per-line information - currently the x and y offsets
> per line are recomputed when needed instead of being stored
> in the PangoLayoutLine structure. 

You need to know word sizes and spacing rules etc.  I've found that to do
a really good job, you need to know an awful lot about the text.  My
current model takes a list of 'textboxes' which describe much about each
word, the code then flows that text through multiple polygons.  Due to
backtracking, it isn't really wise to try and compute these things on the
fly.

> The advantage of the latter approach is that the user only
> needs to learn PangoLayout once, and it also means that there
> is a better separation between the "user level API" and the
> "implementor API".

Yes, I agree.

njh