Over the last week I finally made extensive time for some spare time hacking. I ended up writing a CoreText backend for Pango, which is much needed as the old ATSUI backend that is used on Mac OS X uses the ATSUI API that has been deprecated since 10.5.
While writing this backend I finally got a greater understanding of how Pango works internally. Also I managed to fix the most annoying bug on 64-bit Snow Leopard wherein some ligatures were incorrectly displayed using the wrong glyph (bug 608923).
I hope to be wrapping up development of this new backend soon. Further development and review will be tracked in bug 611943.
Oh yeah, so Lanedo flew all of us to Brussels for FOSDEM this year. (Well actually I went by train. The train was supposed to be hitting 300km/h, but that didn’t really happen, “software issues”, really!). Either way, had lots of time for hacking there as well. With Carlos Garnacho sitting next to me, I managed to port the GTK+ Quartz/Mac OS X backend to his shiny GTK+ xi2 branch in 1.2 days. In the remaining time I looked into getting support for the multitouch trackpads found on all recent Apple laptops going in GTK+/xi2. Even though the branch is called xi2, it is really the GTK+ multi-pointer branch. This last part has been moderately successful. We identified a few kinks in the new API that have to be fixed first. When that has been arranged, it seems well possible to have support for these multitouch trackpads in GTK+ Quartz, and that should be really cool.
When the above mentioned CoreText backend is done, I hope to find the time to at least push the port of GTK+ Quartz to the xi2 branch into the xi2 branch. This means that when the xi2 branch is merged into GTK+ master, the required OS X backend changes will already be included so the backend won’t be broken at that point.