Re: gtk patch against 1.4.0cvs on July 1st.

[Huang Ying]

> If possible pango should be used with gtk, since then a dependency on
> X will be avoided. (gtk/gtkmm exists for Win as well, right?)
> 
> Also if pango is used directly it seems to be possible to do without
> freetype fonts. Is this the case with Xft?
The problem about pango is that It is a high level render system but not
low level render system. So you can not find something about "drawing
string" or "string extents" with pango. Pherhaps we can do some hack to
implement them efficiently using the low level interface of pango, But I
don't think that is a good idea. You can implement them using the high
level interface of pango too, but the efficiency is not satisfied.
Pango is a layout engine. That means it can split text into words, break
words into lines, and adjust the visual order against the logical order.
If you like it can be used as the layout engine of lyx kernel, so that
you will not care about Arabic or Hebrew rendering. It's designed to
work with a whole paragraph.