Hi Tomas,
On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
> > Andrew:
> > Bidi isn't really ready for prime time on Windows. Windows uses all
> > kinds of funky OpenType magic to render nice Arabic script but AbiWord
> > is not doing all it can with font metrics.
>
> I think if we are serious about AW being multilingual, we need to
> consider OpenType; there are parts of Unicode that implicitely rely
> on the capabilities of OpenType and cannot be implemented with
> older font technologies.
>
> I recall that Leonard suggested repeatedly in the past that we
> consider using the FreeType rasteriser in AW, and I am more and
> more inclined to think that he is right about that, and that by relying
> on the rasterisers provided by the OS's (with their varied
> capabilities), we are giving ourselves lot of trouble.
>
Tomas and Andrew, have you looked at the Pango library which will be
distributed as part of GTK 2.0?
See http://www.pango.org
Many people have been telling us that we should use this for genuine
multi-lingual Word Processing. However this is not my area of expertise
and so I would really appreciate comments you guys have on it.
Although this is an integral part of GTK 2.0, we hoped we could use it in
a cross platform setting.
Thanks!
Martin
