Pango Status Report #8 18 Nov 2000
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General news:
The most exciting news in Pango is some of the work that has
been going on with the shaper modules. Robert Brady's new Indic
shapers that use ligature table in the fonts are a lot cleaner
way of doing things than hard-coding the font details, and add
support for quite a few more languages. Chookij Vanatham has
done a lot of work making the Thai shaper fully functional and
standards-compliant. These changes to the Thai shaper will be
integrated soon, though they aren't in Pango-0.13.
There have been some significant improvements to the
internationalization capabilities of GTK+. Of particular
interest is the new input method framework. Instead of tying
GTK+ to XIM, the new system allows dynamically loading input
method modules and switching between them on the fly. These
modules can either be wrappers around systems such as XIM and
IIIMF or direct implementations of input methods. GTK+-1.3.2
contains a XIM wrapper module and also direct implementations of
several input methods, including one Robert created for
Inuktitut. (!)
Recent progress:
There have been numerous changes to Pango since the last status
report - some highlights:
* Win32 Support [Tor]
* Add function to convert XML/GMarkup description to a
PangoAttrList [Havoc]
* New version of Arabic shaper [Karl]
* Enhanced Indic support with ligature tables from the font and
many more languages [Robert]
* Include FriBidi core that provides the features that Pango needs and
can be used instead of separately installed fribidi. [Owen]
* Add PangoLayoutIterator that abstracts the geometry operations for
iterating over the lines/items/clusters/chars in a layout [Havoc]
Plus lots of optimizations and small fixes and improvements.
Releases:
New releases of Pango (0.13) and the development versions of
GLib and GTK+ (1.3.2) are available from:
ftp://ftp.gtk.org:/pub/gtk/v1.3/
RPMS for Red Hat 7.0 are in:
ftp://ftp.gtk.org:/pub/gtk/v1.3/binary/RedHat-7.0/
TODO highlights:
A new XML-generated version of the Pango TODO list is
at:
http://developer.gnome.org/status/pango-todo.html
Havoc is currently working on improving the boundary resolution
algorithm. Most of the other items are currently open.
Misc stuff:
Keith Packard's work on the render extension
(http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/) is proceeding nicely,
including text rendering. I think getting Pango to render using
this and FreeType will be a big step forward.
Recently he posted a description of how he plans to handle font
naming and matching:
http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/fonts/2000-November/000159.html
This is a bit different from how Pango deals with font naming
and matching so some work needs to be done to make sure they
work together properly.
Owen Taylor
Last modified 18-Nov-2000 Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com>