Re: Status of Gnome Print

[Damon Chaplin <damon karuna uklinux net>]

On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 18:04, Chema Celorio wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 03:10, Trever L. Adams wrote:
> > Any work to make it and Pango work together yet?
> 
> This is the most important improvement on the TODO list, I'll start
> working on it after Gnome 2.2 (unless someone starts before I get to it,
> hint, hint). I've given a lot of thought to it at this point but is not
> something that was going to be ready to ship for 2.2.

I think nearly all printing should be based on PangoLayout, since that
does the character shaping and bidirectional layout that is essential to
handle Unicode. So one idea would be to have functions to render an
entire PangoLayout or one PangoLayoutLine from a layout.

(I'm currently trying to add better quality typography features to
Pango, things like hyphenation & justification, drop capitals, kerning,
tracking etc. I don't know if/when they'll be added to Pango though.)

The main problem may be figuring out how to restrict applications so
they only use fonts we can print. And to modify the font selector
widget so it only shows these fonts.

Owen mentioned something about having a postscript backend for Pango.
Maybe that would be like the other backends but only providing printable
fonts, and possibly using different device units, i.e. points.
(We could pass the corresponding PangoContext to the font selector
widget.) But then we may have to subclass each of the backends to
provide printable versions.

What were your thoughts on integrating with Pango?

Damon