Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at panix dot com>]

> Unless there is multi-platform, lightweight rendering API that can
> take a list of Pango glyphs (which I am led to believe is what comes
> out of the far end of the Pango pipeline) and actually draw them on
> the display, I am not sure how much use it would be to us.

It is possible that http://sdlpango.sourceforge.net/ is such a thing.
Although that page seemed to describe lots of issues, without quite
saying just what SDL_Pango does.

> Possibly. But, I have previously mentioned the possibility of writing 
> labels in runic alphabets (both historical and fictitious):

It is the kind of thing which wouldn't be off the shelf.  But using
Unicode's private character numbers and writing yourself a font which
the usual UTF-8 tools can process might be just as easy as doing
everything from scratch.

Of course the real point of using something like Pango would be if we
want to deal with arabic, thai, bidirectional, and the other
complicated cases.  If you just want to put up characters next to each
other, something much simpler like the following (or even home grown
solutions like what we have now) are much more plausible:

http://www.linux-games.com/sfont/
http://www.geocities.com/andre_leiradella/#sdl_bdf