Help me, I want to draw true type fonts in a window

Maxim Levitsky maximlevitsky at gmail.com
Wed Jun 25 10:58:51 PDT 2008


Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le mercredi 25 juin 2008 à 19:54 +0300, Maxim Levitsky a écrit :
> 
>> Small, question just curios, is it possible to draw Unicode strings with Cairo?
> 
> Sure there is, there was an OO.o patch floating to switch OO.o's
> rendering to cairo I think.
> 
>> As I know gnome uses pango for text layouting (choosing which chars to draw)
>> Qt has its own text layouting.
> 
> You won't escape pango (or its new incarnation harfbuzz). QT and GTK are
> converging on harfbuzz, cairo uses pango behind, etc.
> 
> Text rendering is approaching at last typographer requirements, which
> means modern "smart" fonts are several orders of magnitude more complex
> than old bitmap fonts (and people make use of the new features and
> expect them to work). The code needed to interpret those fonts is
> correspondingly more complex. In fact it's getting at the level of
> complexity big projects are dropping their own text layouters fast and
> pooling efforts around a common layouter stack. They can't keep up alone
> anymore. (You have the same phenomenon on windows around uniscribe).
> 
> If you think freetype or xft alone is sufficient nowadays, even for
> latin-only text, you've already lost.
> 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/TextLayout
> 
My dream, is to have standalone font-rendering library which doesn't depend on anything
except maybe freetype.

Pango is still gnome specific, and drags in glib for example

Is there something like this.



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