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Build a Pango based Text Editor

Mentor: Travis Griggs
Second mentor: Diogenes Moreira
Level: Intermediate
Invited students: Armando Perico
Students interested: Hashir Ali(very), Armando Perico

Pango is at the top of the open source text/font stack. It's becoming the defacto on Linux/X11 and gaining traction elsewhere. It uses native engines (CoreFont on OSX and Uniscribe on Windows) where applicable. It has the ability to do multi-lingual matching and rendering, complex character shaping, and BIDI, amongst other things.

Benefits to the Student

Learn (at a high level at least), the ins and outs of modern font/text composition (one of the most taken-for-granted "arts" to computer programming currently). Gain experience in bridging between Smalltalk reifications of external libraries.

Benefits to the Community

If done right, since it does all of the rendering, a text editing ability that is beyond what any of the Smalltalks have, keeps them competitive with other offerings, and should be relatively applicable between different Smalltalk flavors.




Updated: 22.3.2010