Re: GTK+-2.x planning

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Keith Packard <keithp keithp com> writes:a 
> While I'd like to see everyone writing to the Pango API, it's also
> impossible to enforce it.  The current mechanism just makes it harder to
> integrate font selection among the various portions of the application, as 
> well as reducing portability among various Gtk+ implementations.

Yeah, I know. There are also some apps such as the terminal where we
just can't use Pango shaping, and huge apps like Eclipse with a legacy
dependency on oversimplified string layout that just can't be done
correctly in the near future. So that's why it was a screwup to offer
only the high-level API but at the same time we need to shame
developers into doing the right thing.

Probably overboard to call the function
pango_this_hoses_half_the_world_shape() isn't it ;-)

> > Can people use Xft with "old" (not really very old) X servers that
> > lack RENDER? If not, I don't think we can drop core X fonts yet.
> 
> Yes.  Xft2 supports all X servers and even does AA/sub-pixel text on all
> TrueColor visuals.
> 
> > We'd also need it to be simple to download and install Xft on a system
> > without having to get all of XFree, probably.
> 
> That's what Mozilla will be doing for it's Xft code for the time being.
> 
> I have been asked by more than one group to make Xft/Fontconfig releases 
> at a faster rate than the core XFree86 release schedule.  I don't see any 
> problem with that.

I just thought of one issue though, which is that -lpangox is in the
ABI for a few years. Of course it doesn't mean that anyone has to use
it.

If Xft is independent of the X server then breaking it out of the
XFree distribution makes a lot of sense to me. It would really help
adoption if it wasn't "Linux only" in effect, as it is right now.

Havoc