[Skencil-users] Join forces for skencil1/sK1? (was: sK1)

[Simon Budig]

Bernhard Reiter (bernhard at intevation.de) wrote:
> > Gtk or Qt don't provide low level access to fonts which is needed for
> > vector editor.
> 
> They do not? I don't know. I would hope they would provide it.
> As for typesetting texts, the libraries should be suitable I guess,
> but for converting fonts into curves to do special effects
> low level access is needed, I agree.

While I have not experimented with "raw" font access I suspect strongly,
that fontconfig (which is required for pango/gtk (and I guess QT as
well?) anyway) at least provides you with a way to deal with fonts in a
convenient manner. This includes figuring out a filename for a given
fontname. Then of course it should be easy to freetype to get access to
the glyph outlines and all the other informations.

> > We think FreeType binding should  be used  any way like in Scribus or
> > Inkscape.
> 
> It would provide the low level bindings, I guess.
> The big problems for most users of Skencil 0.6 with Tcl/tk is
> that handling fonts was so difficult.
> Many users just would want to install a few additional fonts.

Fontconfig is definitely the way to go here. It makes it nice and easy
to install a font - just drop into a directory...

> > System Gtk/Gnome binding links Skencil development to Gtk/Gnome life cycle.
> > It's also not a good feature.
> 
> The plan to get more benefit out from this might indeed not have worked out.
> At least there now is a history. I am really interested in what Bernhard has
> to say about this.

While I am not sure about the gnome libraries, I believe that GTK+ is an
excellent choice for a toolkit. I am biased of course, but as a Gimp
developer I cannot say that we are "bound" to the GTK+ life cycle. It
usually depends on you, if you really want to use the most recent
features or if you can resist  :)

Bye,
         Simon

-- 
              simon at budig.de              http://simon.budig.de/