Pango Status Report #7 31 May 2000 ====================================== General news: Not much new here this week. There is a new release of fribidi out with updates to the Unicode 3.0 algorithm and some speed improvements. Recent progress: Most work I've been doing recently has concentrated on the converting Pango over to GTK+. The work on this is pretty much done now. I expect to be merging the Pango branch into the main GTK+ sources. Not much has changed in Pango on the surface. I spent quite a bit of time working on optimizing it in my quest to get the Text widget up to speed. Other than speed, the main noticeable change is that I've started converting some portions of Pango to the new GObject system in GLib. This means that Pango now requires GLib-1.3, and thus doesn't really work with GTK+-1.2. In order to keep a working example program with the Pango tarball, I ported the pango-viewer program to Qt. I've also added a simple Thai shaper based on the XTIS precomposed fonts. This is meant to serve as a basis for a shaper-writing tutorial, but I haven't gotten around to the tutorial yet. As always, a large number of bugs in Pango have been fixed. Releases: Pango-0.11 is on available from http://www.pango.org/download.shtml The only RPMS there now are those built against the snapshot GLib, since Pango no longer compiles with GLib-1.2. TODO highlights: The projects I intend to tackle next are: - Merge in the gtk-pango branch of GTK+ - Write some documentation about writing shapers. 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. - Look at writing an XIM module for the new input-method framework in GTK+. (A couple of people have already contacted me about this one.) Misc stuff: Lauris Kaplinski posted a proposal for a major overhaul of the GNOME font system to gnome-devel-list: http://mail.gnome.org/pipermail/gnome-devel-list/2000-May/006153.html There was a considerable amount of discussion between him, myself, and others about how this should interact with Pango. Nathan Hand chipped in with a description of some of the work he is doing with text layout algorithms. He plans on integrating this with Pango in the future. There are some nice screenshots at: http://hawthorn.csse.monash.edu.au/~njh/phd/text-widget.html Owen Taylor