Pango Status Report #6 25 Apr 2000 ====================================== General news: Robert Brady has contributed a shaper for Devanagari. Eventually, we hopefully we can share some code between the different Indic languages, but this looks like a very good start. I've added a couple of pages to www.pango.org with information about topics related to GTK+. One page is about input methods and keyboard maps: http://www.pango.org/input-resources.shtml The other about fonts: http://www.pango.org/font-resources.shtml These are still pretty incomplete, but I hope they will eventually be useful resources. Let me know if there is information that you think should be added to them. Uri David Akavia created a XKB map for Hebrew which is linked to from the input-resources page. Recent progress: The Pango-ization of the GTK+ port of the Tk Text widget is pretty much complete now. Its almost as functional and stable as the pre-Pango version, and the bidirectional editing behavior should be at least approximately right. I've made just a few additions to Pango to support the work I've been doing in GTK+. I've added support functions for getting selection ranges, visual cursor navigation, and similar tasks. Quite a few bugs in Pango and the Pango branch of GTK+ have been fixed. Releases: Pango-0.10 is on available from www.pango.org. RPM's of pango, libunicode and libfribidi are also there. I've also put up snapshots of GTK+ with Pango support at the same place. These are very much unstable and unsupported; but if any brave souls want to try them out and give suggestions (or fixes) for the editing behavior, I'd appreciate it. This time around, there are also RPMS of the GTK+ snapshots and their dependencies. These are supposed to be pretty easy to install. I spent some time today making the testtext program useable as a miniature text text editor. So, if you try out the RPMS, this may be fun to play with. TODO highlights: The projects I intend to tackle next are: - Write some documentation about writing shapers. - Remove GDK fonts from the last few GTK+ widgets (things like GtkRuler) - Figure what the font interfaces will look like for GTK+-1.4 - Start doing some performance analysis of Pango. (The Text widget is noticeably slow with a couple of thousand lines of text.) Some interesting projects that other people might want to consider: - Write a libart based font-system and renderer to go along with the X based one. It would be good to have an idea about how well the interfaces work with something other than X before we get too far along. (Alternatively, write a FreeType-based font-system and renderer to go along with the X-based one.) - Write a shaping engine for whatever language you are interested in. - Come up with a XKB-based keyboard map for Arabic, so people can test out the GTK+ editing support with Arabic. (If you are interested this but don't know how to procede with this, let me know and I can give some hints.) - Look at writing an XIM module for the new input-method framework in GTK+. (It may still be a bit early, but if you would be interested in working on this, let me know. We can discuss what is involved.) Misc stuff: May 1 is the deadline for paper submisssions for both the Unicode conference: http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc17/call.txt and the Atlanta Linux Symposium: http://www.linuxshowcase.org/cfp/ Owen Taylor
Last modified 31-May-2000 Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com>