On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:01:24 +1000 Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > this is why EFL doesn't have support. i'd have to write it all, OR use > pango... > and pango, last i looked, was not light on overhead,
Agreed there. Have not actually benchmarked Pango myself, but by all accounts it is resource-hungry, though that is probably not inappropriate for a library aiming to handle all of Unicode. > so as a matter of > performance doing it the simple way its done now handles things for most > people > (who buy/use devices or linux systems as most people tend to speak a > left-to-right friendly language). i have seen remarkably little interest in > things like left-to-right languages over the years, and as there isn't a lot > of > demand and i don't actually speak any of these (i just speak european > languages > - a few of them, and east-asian languages), i just have never had it come up > high enough on the list of things to do.. to ever do it. at least all the text > internals are utf8 so... it's possible to do this without breakages... I would disagree here, though I can quite see why you might not want to take this up. Having OpenMoko hardware handle Indic text would be a big plus for its adoption here in India. An ability to send SMS in local languages would be even more of a plus, though that will also have to contend with service provider gateways that have no clue about UTF-8 or Unicode. Given the current hardware limitations, the best approach for Indic languages is probably to make a special font that includes all possible glyph combinations, and a light-weight, custom rendering engine that works with the font. This would also have the benefit of allowing the rendering of Indic content on text-based terminals, such as the Linux console. This is not really *that* hard a task, and from what I hear various phone companies are sniffing around in India for someone able to put this together. Regards, Gora _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
