Next tasks

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi,

I hope that I will find some time again for GNUstep. This surely wont be
much, so I will have to plan what to do next. I made a list of possible
tasks that I might take and perhaps we can discuss, what will  be most
useful.

1. Work on font support

I think that for anti-aliased fonts we should use the new features of
XFree86 4.1 (for which I wrote a already half working class). We also
need a interface between frontend and backend to submit Unicode strings
for drawing. And the whole font manager code should be rewritten to use
a better font cache format that will provide all the information for a
font without actually loading the font itself.

2. New render implementation

The way GNUstep handles alpha values when drawing is totally different
from what Aqua does (Alpha values are often ignored and if handled
influence only the window drawing not its contents). This is so because
we rely on the X functions, which did not offer alpha handling up to
now. There a also a lot of drawing operations not present in GNUstep at
all.

3. Backend for MS Windows

I already did start to separate parts of our backend that are not
specific to X. This will give an abstract layer for backend, which than
has to be filled with specific code for MS Windows.

4. Review our current GUI code

This is something I started last winter. This will help to bring all of
our current code  to the same level. Although this will add only a
little bit of new functionality it will make to old correcter and more
reliable. I only did get a far as the NSComboBoxCell, so there is much
left to do.

5. Implement the printing classes

This is also a work I started, but did not finish.

6. Work on other missing parts of the GUI.