Most popular libraries not in the HP

[briand at aracnet.com]

On Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:47:03 -0300
Felipe Lessa <felipe.lessa at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 4:39 PM,  <briand at aracnet.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:56:23 +0200
> > Axel Simon <Axel.Simon at in.tum.de> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> As far as I can see, there is a gradual overhead of C libraries
> >> involved here. The Platform could ship the following subsets of
> >> Gtk2Hs:
> >>
> >> cairo
> >> cairo+glib+pango
> >> cairo+glib+pango+gio
> >> cairo+glib+pango+gio+gtk
> >>
> >> It's a question of how big the tar ball is and how much work it is
> >> to bundle the C libraries with the Platform.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >
> > That's why I voted for including just cairo.
> >
> > it's low overhead, high quality and gives your haskell install
> > access to cross-platform graphics capability.
> 
> How useful is cairo without pango?
> 

Good question ! Fonts are still available even without pango, for
example freetype fonts are supported. I think there are limitations
but I can't remember exactly what.

I've been down this road before, and I think that for basic use your
good-to-go without pango as long as you don't want to run your text
along a spiral path, or something like that.

What I can't remember and what some of my example code doesn't reveal,
is whether text rotation is possible.  As long as you can scale and
rotate cairo withot pango would be ok, right ?

 Brian