Re: --gtk-unbuffered

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Hans Breuer <hans breuer org> writes:

> At 14:49 27.02.01 +0200, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> >> * alex looks at the win32 pango code.
> >> * alex screams in pain.
> >
> >Yup, I have not claimed that it would be even close to ready. I
> >haven't done much any work on it for months, I know. Personally I
> >would vote for using the FreeType2 Pango backend for GDK on Win32,
> >because the (portable portion of the) native Win32 font API just
> >sucks. And, as more people have worked on the FreeType2 Pango code, it
> >should be of better quality.

I really think that Pango should be using native fonts on Win32 when
possible. If not, Pango/Win32 will have inferior quality/speed of
rendering to other applications on windows, and to X11.

(While the future direction of X is towards client side fonts and
FreeType, rendering is still done with specialized server support.)

Also, integration with system font installation and naming may be
compromised if the system font names are bypassed.

I don't have a very good idea of where the Win32 font APIs are and
where they are going; the start was certainly rather crude, and
they've certainly have made quite a few changes a long the way, as
well as adding new subsystems recently with Uniscribe and OTLS. (I'm
not sure if OTLS is or will be part of newer versions of Windows, or
is simply something they are licensing commercially to application
vendors.)

So, it may be hard to make a Pango backend that is both fully
functional and can work with all Win32 platforms.

But, since Pango is meant to the font handling away from the
application, and even, mostly, the toolkit, it is certainly possible
to use Win32 backend in some cases, and fall back to a FreeType
backend on older platforms.

> >If Hans still would prefer to use the native Win32 Pango backend, it
> >probably can relatively easily be made into a runtime choice in GDK
> >(on Win32) which Pango backend to use?

The X11 port has a runtime choice of backend (X11 or Xft), so it
certainly is not hard.

Regards,
                                        Owen