Re: Printing glyphs (Was: GNUstep 0.8.5 pre-release)

[Alexander Malmberg]

Fred Kiefer wrote:
> 
> I did write a short hack to allow for glyph printing even without
> support in the backend. In the long run this must be replaced again.

It only works for backends that identity-map characters to glyphs, so
printing with back-art doesn't currently work. Those who want to use
back-art and print will have to use my patch for now.

> But
> I think that this should be done on the NSLayoutManager level, as we
> should stick with the show PS operator and supply characters to it,
> instead of sending glyphs to PostScript.

This isn't an option in the long term; using only characters and show is
too limiting. Using show with adaptive encoding vectors will probably be
nice later when we optimize, but that still involves sending glyphs to
the backend.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, NSLayoutManager is doing the Right Thing,
and the interface we already have is enough. Implementing it might be
tricky, but it is necessary if we want a good text system.

- Alexander Malmberg