Re: using fribidi and Pango

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> My recent work in Pango made me believe that writing general
> purpose libraries for algorithms is just not easy to get right.
> You cannot have an stable general API and high performance
> together.  Algorithms to consume low memory and perform fast,
> need to integrate into eachother at levels not quite possible by
> library APIs.

Yes, this is why I have been very resistant to use Pango in the win32
version of AbiWord -- perhaps Pango should limit itself to being a *nix
library, but this is probably not of great interest to this list.

> Even an array containing the input text is being
> problematic.  There's always someone asking for UTF-8, one for
> UTF-16, another for UTF-32.  Then there are libraries that keep
> some kind of struct Char [], that contains more than the text
> itself.  You just cannot write a fast low-overhead library to
> handle them all.  And you cannot use glib, since too many
> projects don't use it, so you need to define all the UTF-8 and
> UTF-16 functions yourself, should you go that route.  Not talking
> about how hard just finding a 32-bit integer can be...

Yep, the utf8 api of Pango is such a pain when you work with ucs4 ;)

> I'm more interested to see the highlevel PangoLayout object
> extended to cover needs of applications like Emacs and AbiWord.
> And I'm willing to hear more about those needs :).

My gut instinct is that I am not sure whether that is practicable but I
would be very much interested in pursuing this further -- not sure what
would be the best forum where to throw ideas around.

Tomas

		
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