On Mon, 2002-06-03 at 16:19, Achim Gerber wrote: > Hi all, Hi! Sorry for the late reply
> I am new here. > > I am searching for a word processor that is supporting the free range of > UNICODE. The inner mongolian script is writen vertical from left to right. > So far I didn't find any SW. > > Is Abiword supporting vertical script? > > How difficult is it to implement? I am a profesional c++ programmer. Well, I think that you already you know that, but...: it's difficult! We don't yet support vertical text. Mongolian is even harder than usual vertical scripts, because AFAIK mongolian people should be able to mix mongolian text with other scripts, that have different directions. And we've just escaping right now from the BMP. In HEAD we're already targeting UCS-4, but we still don't write type 11 fonts, and we don't do subsetting, nor incremental downloading of fonts, and I don't remember if we support CID-keyed fonts, but I don't think so. Adapting AbiWord to mongolian is going to require expertise in a bunch of fields (ranging from mongolian itself to postscript, passing through abiword and pango internals). For the next big version we're going to use pango, which don't support mongolian, neither. If you want an advice, mine would be: start hacking in AbiWord with simpler problems (there are a bunch on simpler i18n problems to fix), get comfortable with abiword internals. Help with the pango integration (right now handled by Tomas), and at the end, add mongolian support to pango and integrate it in abiword. None of these steps are trivial. For instance, I think that uniscribe supports a bit mongolian, but MS Word don't supports it because it was too hard to change MS Word layout to accommodate such a language. Before trying to add mongolian support to pango, I will wait until Owen adds vertical layouts to pango (I think that he'll start working on it for the next version of pango). It's not an easy path, but we will be more than eager to help in everything we can. Cheers, -- Joaqu�n Cuenca Abela [EMAIL PROTECTED]
