On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 11:23 AM, David Haslam <[email protected]> wrote: > Greg wrote, "GoBible overcomes this by using Graphite somehow." > > Well, I suppose some phone manufacturers may have designed in Graphite into > their firmware, but the fact of the matter is that Go Bible relies entirely > upon what Unicode font coverage has been provided by the mobile phone > manufacturer. It's pretty rare for any phone to have font coverage for the > whole of the Basic Multilingual Plane. Manufacturers tend to have firmware > variants for different marketing regions, to keep their stock levels > manageable.
It sounded, from Greg's talk, like they have modified the GoBible JAR file to leverage their Graphite library. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_(SIL). Somehow this allowed them to use GoBible with minority and unsupported scripts on phones which did not natively support the full range of Unicode coverage. The technology and library are very powerful. It could possibly be used by AndBible as well, since Android has relatively poor coverage of some Unicode ranges. I have just pulled out my phone, which is running a custom FroYo (2.2) ROM and it displayed basic Roman script and Arabic relatively well but fell flat on its face with extended Roman and didn't even attempt Burmese. iOS, on the other hand, has very excellent and extensive support for Unicode since it comes out of the OS X tradition and its very-well regarded support of non Western scripts. Across all the solutions (except for PDF, which embeds its own fonts in the file) they said they consistently found Android to be very lacking and weak in support of non-Roman scripts but iOS to be excellent. This fits with my experience as well. --Greg _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: [email protected] http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
