[fontforge-devel] Some rookie questions about GUI

[Thor C. <tca...@gm...>]

Hi, this might seem like some very basic stuff here, but I've been skimming
through the code just to get an overview on how FontForge is built and some
really basic stuff just seems difficult to discern from the code and
documentation alone.

I think this project could learn a lot from InkScape when it comes to
documentation and code structure.

Anyway, the first thing I do when I try and understand code is to look for
the GUI code so I can see how the UI fits with the functionality of the
program. For FontForge this has been rather difficult, all I could find
about the GUI from the docs is this part from the FAQ:

* "**Why doesn't it use the native MS Windows or Mac windowing system?*

   - *FontForge is not a commercial product and is not bound by the
   constraints of the market.*
   - *Doing that port doesn't interest me.*
   - *I don't have time nor do I have the skill to take that task on.*
   - *I'd like to encourage people to use Linux/unix*

*Of course, if I were to use either gtk or qt
<https://fontforge.github.io/faq.html#widget-set> some of the difficulties
of porting would vanish. But unfortunately I don't like either of those
widget sets.*

*Now... if you would like to do the port, that would be wonderful. I
encourage you to do so.*
* Why is FontForge based on a non-standard widget set? ..."*
None of this information explains what this widget set is or how it draws
its GUI, the only hint I've found is that it uses Cairo, somewhere in the
code it looks like it draws the GUI pixel by pixel, and there's a GDraw
directory with some datatypes such as GWindow and GWidget that seem to be
related to the UI, but trying to follow the function calls and see where it
ends it's very difficult to get an idea on how the GUI code works.
Since I'm still confused about this, I think this is probably something a
lot of other people might have a problem understanding as well when they
first start looking into the FontForge source code. I'd say it increases
the learning curve and reduces the possibility of more developers
contributing to this project.

Maybe you should have a more in depth overview on which libraries are used
and how they work in the docs?

Some of my questions are:
1. What is the name of this non-standard widget set? 2. Is there any
documentation for how it works?
3. How is a window created using this widget set?
4. Where do I find the event listeners? Is it a signal/slot pattern, or
something else?

Hope I'm not spamming with too basic stuff here, but I've been trying to
get into the code without any luck several times now, and I'm starting to
think this is something other people might want to know about as well.
 - Thor Arisland