[cairo] cairo/quartz on iPhone

Behdad Esfahbod behdad at behdad.org
Mon Mar 10 08:14:07 PDT 2008


On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 12:45 -0500, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:

> ATSUI does complex text layout for OSX; it's roughly equivalent to  
> Pango.  It's been deprecated (it has a horrid API and is slow for many  
> things), and at least on desktop OSX, is being replaced with Core  
> Text.  CT is much nicer to work with, and I'm pretty sure these days  
> ATSUI is using a lot of CT under the hood.  I'm not sure what the  
> complex text layout replacement is on the iPhone, but I don't think  
> that matters for cairo's purposes.
> 
> CGFont is just a handle to a native (unscaled) font; you can do things  
> like render glyphs, convert unicode chars to glyph ids, get glyph  
> bounds, etc., but it doesn't do any complex text layout; it's also  
> sticking around, unlike ATSUI :)  This is the right level for cairo to  
> be hooking into anyway -- it maps pretty directly to the font_face/ 
> scaled_font operations.

Right.  I always was unhappy about using ATSUI for cairo fonts, but
didn't know that a lower-level API exists.

> > Also, getting quartz as supported in 1.6 may not be very realistic.   
> > If
> > you are serious about it, you may want to move the quartz_image stuff
> > into a separate header file for now.  Without those, the cairo- 
> > quartz.h
> > API looks solid.  Same about cairo-atsui.h, even if atsui will be
> > deprecated, that function is still useful, and we can add other
> > font-face constructors in the future.  Or should the CGFont stuff be
> > done as a new font backend with a new type?
> 
> Sure, if it's just the quartz image stuff you object to, that's an  
> easy fix :)  I'll move those into a separate header, do you want a  
> separate configure option for it as well?  The CGFont backend is a new  
> font backend, but the current atsui entry point can easily be  
> implemented in terms of it (there's a straightforward way to go from  
> an ATSFontRef to a CGFontRef).

How about removing cairo-atsui and adding CGFont?  If you can provide
that, and a patch to Pango, I'm fine with it going in.

Of course it doesn't help that CAIRO_FONT_TYPE_ATSUI is in cairo.h... I
tried my best to keep backend names out of cairo.h, but I lost...

>      - Vlad

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759



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