[Mono-dev] Mono SWF on Windows?

[Peter Dennis Bartok]

>Yes, we actually want to be able to render a complex non-Roman script
>as part of a localized UI. We want to be able to handle scripts that
>Microsoft does not yet support, such as Myanmar (Burmese). Pango does
>handle these, because it supports SIL Graphite text rendering.


>So, we'd need to get MWF to continue to use Pango when run on WIndows.
>Perhaps one coud compile MWF to use Pango, on Windows, for rendering
>widgets?
The plan right now is to put pango support into our libgdiplus library 
(Which only gets used on Unix systems). On Windows we're using Microsoft's 
GDI+ library (through System.Drawing). This means what we would not have 
pango on Win32. Using pango on all platforms would require us to create a 
separate API inside MWF for text output. I'm not sure the extra effort and 
the added dependencies make sense for us. However, since all text output 
(except for TextBox/RichTextBox) go through a theme driver, you could create 
a theme that uses pango instead of DrawString to do the output, and p/invoke 
pango inside the theme code. TextBox is a bit different, due to the extra 
work involved in finguring out cursor direction movement, etc. The theme you 
can do yourself, today.
We've only had superficial discussions about pango internally, so far, plans 
still may change, in fact proper textbox support my require us to use pango 
on all platforms, but this is post-1.2 so we're ignoring it, while hunkered 
down trying to get MWF ready for 1.2.

Cheers,
  Peter