Re: Motif support

[Po Lu]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> I think I have expressed myself badly here; anyway what I meant, Emacs
> could use pango and harfbuzz and whatever else it uses on X together
> with freetype2 to render text on all platforms.

We don't use Pango on X for anything more than converting the output of
the GTK font selection dialog to a font spec.

HarfBuzz is already used on MS-Windows, and the idea is to eventually
use it on macOS as well.

As for using FreeType, what benefit would it bring?  Rendering text with
FreeType is not very easy and involves writing a lot of interface code
for each platform, often more than using the platform's built-in
interface.  (For simple examples, see the deleted ftx driver, or the
ftbe driver that was deleted, and for non-trivial examples, see
ftcrfont.c and xftfont.c.)

It usually involves Fontconfig as well, which doesn't work very well
non-Unix systems.