Re: Motif support

[xenodasein]

Dec 24, 2021, 03:38 by luangruo@yahoo.com:

> That benefit is hardly established.
>

We could establish deeper, but any developer who worked
on both traditional desktop apps or graphical apps with their
own rendering like "games" will tell you same things.


> What about locating the font files to open? Scaling glyphs, which is
> usually the job of the platform, and essentially required for color
> Emoji? What about displaying the resulting bitmap, or decomposed glyph
> outline?
>
> All those tasks need platform-dependent code, and about the same amount
> as supporting the native font rasterizer.
>
> Then take a look at ftfont.c, the "abstract" FreeType font driver,
> unless you're saying we should also reinvent the (platform-specific)
> code to detect and use installed fonts?
>

You kinda have to use platform dependent features directly, as we
are not programming into aether.  However, painting menus isn't one.
You don't need a third-party solution, whether it is from platform itself
like legacy win32 GUI elements or another library.  Using them is like
using a sledgehammer to drive a nail in Emacs' case. We could even do
the text rendering itself too, provided an expert would contribute it to
Emacs.  But no one said let's do text rendering, AFAIK.