[vlc-devel] [RFC PATCH] freetype: using Pango for text layout

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

    Hello,

Le 2015-01-21 04:31, Salah-Eddin Shaban a écrit :
> So what do you guys think? Should we go with PangoFT2 or PangoCairo?

It boils down to two things:

Q1) Which one is easiest to write and maintain, considering that the 
remaining bugs and missing features (embedded fonts?) need to be 
implemented eventually?

Q2) Does one present dependency problems (license, further libraries) 
worse than the other?

I am not very familiar with those, but I'd hazard:

A1) Cairo is easier and less buggy.

A2) Pango depends on glib regardless of the back-end. Cairo depends on 
more stuff, since it depends on FreeType anyway, but Cairo's presence is 
pretty much a given on desktop Unices. On MacOS/Windows (assuming Pango 
and glib), Cairo could use native font rendering instead of FreeType so 
it might actually be better.

Then again, you probably know better than me

> Same module or a separate one?

As I already wrote, a separate module is necessary anyway to remove the 
direct dependency on Fribidi, and if possible FontConfig too - 
especially if HarfBuzz is going to replace Fribidi and/or FontConfig 
down the line.

At the source level, PangoCairo would most certainly be separate for 
obvious reasons. If you stick to the PangoFT2 route, it would be nice to 
split the Pango and non-Pango bits to separate source "modules", and 
keep only the common FreeType code in freetype.c.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont