OCT
13
2006
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Text Layout SummitLast weekend I was at Gnome Live, Boston to attend the Text Layout Summit. As I am a KWord developer I'm particularly interested in making sure KWord will be able to properly render all the notoriously difficult stuff that a good internationalized application should support. On this end I got quite some insight. For example Edward Trager is quite the expert in non-latin scripts and could draw us quite some texts which shows problems and ideas I would not have come up with myself. The last day was the most interesting one, as it extended beyond learning from others to where the various open source players got together and reuse code and effort to make sure we will reuse the most basic logic to do text layout. Work has been started to move so called 'shapers' to a shared library where both Qt and Pango build on top off. This is tightly coupled with reusing different font engines needed to parse specific fonts and font features. The end result will be that we have gotten quite a big step closer to the goal of supporting all scripts known to man, and we do it in such a way that all free software will be able to use the same library so a user will not have to ask himself why text layout in KWord looks different from Firefox. More close to home; I also had some talks with Simon on all the features I need in Qt to do proper text layouting in KWord. Nothing like a face to face meeting for things like that. I'm optimistic that Qt4.3 will be able to support KOffice2 with really good support for languages and all those OpenDocument Features that we lacked in the past.
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Comments
Moving towards same DPI policy?
shared library where both Qt and Pango build on top off
Will this somehow affect KDE DPI handling? I rather like how it functions now - where a typographical point has some meaning. I would prefer to have monitor dimensions define DPI in KDE. Will this change somehow with the common layout engine?
DPI
Using the x-server DPI settings for text layout is really a decision very high up in the software stack.
For example KWord has its own DPI config to make sure we can zoom WYSIWYG text layout (just scaling a font turns out to be impossible).
What we see in Gnome is that they use one DPI setting and assume the X server is wrong. KDE does the opposite, being optimistic that X gives the right settings and show the fonts based on the exact size of the screen (so a 12 pt font on screen can be measured and found correct). KDE has a new setting in the latest minor release to use a hardcoded DPI like Gnome does.
I don't think this setup will change.
What will be new in Qt4.3?
I'm optimistic that Qt4.3 will be able to support KOffice2 with really good support for languages and all those OpenDocument Features that we lacked in the past.
What will be new in Qt4?