Re: [gnome-print] Serializing a PangoFont

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 16 o'clock on Jul 8, Chema Celorio wrote:

> I am unsure of the long term usage of the metafile but since everything is
> working fine as it is I don't want to touch that code right now. So about
> sharing a metafile between computers, not for the visible future. It is
> just an intermediate format for now which will go away if i ever find a
> reason to do so (i.e. performance hit)

Unless you staple the font object down while you're printing, there's no 
way to ensure that you'll get the same object with two calls into the font 
API -- the font configuration may well change and you may get garbled 
output.  It might be "good enough" for the time being, but I think you 
should consider a future where the meta file goes away, not for 
performance reasons, but because it doesn't completely encapsulate the 
page representation and it's supposed to.

I haven't yet found a good reason to use rand() when picking fonts, but 
even still, there's a *lot* of magic going on between the Gtk+ API and the 
printed page...

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab