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Re: Glyphs and the text system


From: Richard Frith-Macdonald
Subject: Re: Glyphs and the text system
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 16:55:45 +0100

On Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 04:33  pm, BALATON Zoltan wrote:

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Alexander Malmberg wrote:
Glyph generation (in this context) means taking a sequence of abstract
(unicode) characters and turning them into a sequence of glyphs that
represent those characters, in some sense.
[...]
If we want even halfway-proper wysiwyg, printing will have to use the
same glyphs (with the same positioning and stuff) as the displayed
stuff. This isn't really a problem at the -gui level; it can just use
[NSGraphicsContext -GSShowGlyphs::]. Implementing it might be tricky,
though.

OK, then it is basically what I imagined. But then there is something I
don't understand. From the above description it seems to me that glyph
generation is done by the gui library as it uses GSShowGlyphs that takes
translated glyphs not character codes (unicode). But before you wrote:

On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Alexander Malmberg wrote:
1.
Glyph generation. This needs to be done in the backend. I'll write one
for the freetype-based code in back-art, but other backends might be a
problem. I can write a dumb default one that works like the current one,
though.

Which states that glyph generation is done in the backend. I'm confused
now and probably still missing something.

Assuming I understand it correctly ...

The frontend does layout using the glyph information, so it needs to generate glyphs from characters ... in the sense that it needs to call a routine to
perform that operation.
The backend is the thing which actually knows which glyphs are available ... it needs to perform the translation from characters to glyphs for the frontend.

So, the frontend controls/triggers generation of glyphs, the backend does the
work.





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