[Gnustep-dev] Re: [Discuss-gnustep] State of the text system

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi Philippe,

according to the GNUstep home page I am the one who is currently
responsible for the text system. A job I did not ask for, but somehow,
if you start to work in one area, it becomes your responsibility. Some
months ago Jonathan and Gregory said, that they would like to work on
it, but as far as I know nothing happened. I am still trying to build up
the basic infrastructure for the text processing, currently the encoding
stuff to get more fonts working with GNUstep. Beside this I am trying to
separate the GSSimpleLayoutManager from the rest of the NSText code, so
we can replace it more easily with a better implementation. This should
be done by the middle of the week. The problem here is that I really
don't understand the code and don't want to break it until we have a
better replacement.

When this is done and if it is worth the effort, I could build up
another intermediate implementation of a layout manager, based on the
NSStringDrawing code. (The main restriction here is "char == glyph")
This surely is not the best way to get a real Openstep implementation,
but if you need it I would do that extra work. As far as I see, it won't
save any work to implement some non rich text editor. The rich text
comes almost fr free if the rest is done properly.

I don't quite understand what it is that you are missing in the current
implementation of NSText. If you could formulate more precise what you
want, I might try to get that working even with the current layout
manager. What about a list of three or four items that you really need
for the project centre in the next weeks? And would you like to see that
intermediate layout manager or can you wait for the real one?

Fred