Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Jim Kingdon wrote:
> > 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. 

I looked at their code example. It appears to be just what I had in 
mind. It takes a Pango context (containing the glyphs) and draws it onto 
a SDL surface. Perfect. Case closed.

> > 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.

Ah, I forgot about the private character numbers in Unicode. I think 
that this solves the abovementioned problem. Good thought.

> 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.  

Sure.

Based on the info you just provided, it looks like we can cover both the 
internationalization issue (for people who want to use SDL Xconq in a 
language other than en_US), and the game designer-specified labels issue.

  Thanks,
     Eric