How about font rendering? Would I use freetype/harfbuzz with this? They're such a bitch to build on Windows. Currently I'm using DirectWrite but having portability would be a nice bonus, as it seems that the API of this isn't worse than Direct2D.
The Firefox and Servo team are currently hard at work on Pathfinder, which should solve this for both fonts and SVG. It'll run on the GPU like WebRender which is super exciting: https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder - alas it's still a WIP at the moment.
That's very interesting, didn't know about this. It seems like it'll take substantial time for this to stabilize though. But still, something to revisit next time I'm evaluating options.
freetype and harfbuzz don't draw text. Freetype reads font files and gives you individual glyphs, and harfbuzz does "shaping". Pango does layout but also doesn't draw text.
I know, which is why I said 'font rendering' - but of course (for any practical purpose) that extends into drawing onto a context/canvas/whatever it's called in a specific ecosystem. Pango can draw to Cairo (modulus some very pedantic definitions of 'draw'), for example, but in some combinations of glyph rendering/layouting/drawing libraries you have to fiddle with getting one library to render as a path and then use generic path drawing routines to actually rasterize. I can't be bothered with that sort of minutiae, hence my question - how much (if at all) is this library integrated with other functionality to render, query the rendered form, and rasterize text.
I mean, say what you want about DirectWrite and the Direct2D environment - but at least it's very clear how things fit together and it works very well, even for niche use cases. In open source land, you spend days just puzzling together the pieces - let alone build them and getting them to actually do something useful from code. I've tried plenty over the last 15 years.
