Re: Hacktext availability

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 04:46:31PM -0400, Thomas J. Duck wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>      Thanks for your email on this, which is much appreciated.
> 
> > > 1) Can you make the Hacktext interface public?  It's currently private.
> > There are no plans to do this, and I would be against such a change.
> > gnomeprintui is the wrong place for that code to live.  We are
> > moving towards pure pango for text rendering.
> 
>      If I understand correctly, pango doesn't allow text rotations, and so
> you would be giving up that capability.  Can you confirm this for me?

pango-1.8 does support rotation.
 
> > > 2) Alternatively, would it be possible to transfer Hacktext (and other
> > >    required files) to the GnomeCanvas, so that others can benefit from
> > >    this work?
> >
> > It's possible, although gnomecanvas is not seeing alot of
> > development right now.
> >
> > I'd reccomend just cloning the code into your project (it's lgpl).
> 
>      OK, I will give this some thought.  It would be nice to make this
> code more generally available, but I'm not sure what the best way to do
> this is if it is not in your plans.

There are two simple approaches.
1) Use the existing affine support in gnomecanvas to rotate the
   text.  It's not perfect but it works.
2) Use the new pango-1.8 level apis
    pango_context_get_matrix (context);
    pango_matrix_rotate (&rotmat, rv->rotation);
    pango_context_set_matrix (context, &rotmat);
in gnomecanvas.

> > >      I am a developer with the plplot project
> > Interesting.  We've been working on a plotting library in gnumeric
> > as part of libgoffice.  We should compair notes at some point.
> 
>      I would be happy to.  My recent contribution to the plplot cvs was
> the Gnome Canvas Widget (gcw) driver, which allows you to embed
> plots in Gnome applications.  Good fun!

Drop by #gnumeric on irc.gnome.org some time.