Re: [scintilla] Pango support on GTK+ 2.x

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2003-03-09 at 05:46, Biswapesh Chattopadhyay wrote:
> [I'm CC-ing the gtk-devel guys - hopefully they'll have some ideas]
> 
> > Pango text rendering is now supported on GTK+ 2.x. This provides very
> > slow, high quality antialiased Unicode text. You specify use of Pango by
> > prefixing the font name with '!', so '!Sans' or '!Serif' should always be
> > possible. This technique of using a prefix character allows mixed use of
> > Pango and GDK text rendering such as when you are only allowing non-ASCII
> > in
> > comments or string literals and want the faster speed of GDK for most of
> > the
> > code.
> 
> I'd really like to use Pango exclusively for the text, mainly because:
> 	1. The overall look-n-feel of anjuta is spoilt because the editor fonts
> look totally out-of-sync with the rest of the GUI
> 	2. The preferences stuff, especially fonts, will become very awkward
> with the hacks to support special indicators for pango fonts. Also,
> gtk-fontselection will be difficult to use because of this.
> 
> However, a 9X slowness just for using Pango seems a bit too high a price
> to pay for nice-looking text :-(

gdk_draw_* cannot be used under any circumstances. The only
_alternative_ to using Pango is to use Xft directly. (Or XDrawString()
directly if you were that insane.)

I have no idea of what exactly Anjuta is doing, but you might want to
try Pango CVS ... for short strings, it is a lot faster. (4x faster.)

Also, make sure you are testing with the Xft backend ... the X backend
is slower and won't be in Pango-1.4.

Regards,
                                             Owen