Here is some background that might be helpfull. I hope that it does not add to the confusion.
It is not possible to do a reasonable job of rendering debrew diacritics by algorithmic means. By "reasonable job" I mean rendering that you would not be embarrassed to use in an advertisement or business letter. By "algorithmic means" I mean by use of some heuristic based on the external dimensions of the consonental glyphs to which the diacritics apply. The reason for this is the the style of the font affects the placement of the diacritic. For example, consider the letter "i" without the dot to be a Hebrew letter, and the dot to be a Hebrew diacritic. In order to put the two together in a visually appealing way, "i", you need information from the font about where to place the dot. If the dot is slightly to the right or left or too high or low, the native reader will immediatelty sense the gaff.
Because of this, there is no way to render Hebrew diacritics "reasonably" without OT fonts. The best that you can do with a TT font is to use only diacritics that are placed below the base line, and place them directly under the consonant to which they apply and hope for the best. Sometimes it will look Ok, sometimes it wont, depending on the font style and size and the degree to with the font author might have known about your diacritic placement heuristic or not. You can't use the diacritics that are in the mid line or above the glyph, since the herustic placement strategy will almost always cause the diacritic to collide with part of the glyph (e.g. SHIN DGUSH), and even some of the diacritics below the base line will be incorrectly placed for the four "final form" letters.
I expect that as time goes by, more Hebrew fonts will use the OT GSUB and GPOS tables for diacritic positioning. Some complex cases, such as Biblical text layout, require treating a consonant with two or more diacritics as a ligature with its own glyph in order to get the placement right. Some foundaries might decide to position *all* diacritics in some fonts using GSUB if the font is very fancy or it is easier for them to do this and font file size is not an issue.
In summary, the responsibility for correct placement of diacritics in Hebrew should be shifted to the font. We still need some fallback heuristic for diacritic placement when non-OT fonts are used. For some non-OT fonts the heurustic will work better than others. When OT fonts with GSUB and GPOS data of any sort are used, I think that it is reasonable to rely entirely on the GPOS and GSUB data and not apply any further heuristics to attempt to position the diacritics.
I am CC'ing two authorities, Sivan Toledo and Maxim Iorsh on this post as I believe that they have a better understanding of the above issues that I do and might want to post some corrections to the above.
Regards,
- yba
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Jens Herden wrote:
Hi Eike,
When I apply the patch to ICU 2.6 I can actually see the problems with Khmer change but not disappear.
Hmm.. if it doesn't solve but just shift the problem I don't think it would be worth applying the patch to 2.6, or would it?
Right, that's the reason why the subject is talking about Hebrew and not Khmer ;-)
Meanwhile I saw an issue in the OOo bug-database related to Hebrew and I think this ICU bug was mentioned there as well.
Do remember the issue's number / summary or the query you used?
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=14069
Reading this again confuses me a bit, but I am not in favor for Hebrew so that
I feel no wish to understand this yet.
My impression was that this is a rather simple patch and I decided to post it here so that people may have a look.
Of course. I'd like to have some more feedback however, before I apply a patch that affects all RightToLeft layout without me knowing what exactly it does ;-)
That is the very correct way to deal with it :-)
BTW. are there plans when OOo will switch to ICU 3.2 ?
If QA resources permit I'd like to do that for the next release after 2.0, hopefully 2.0.1 if possible, depends on the time frame we'll have.
That would be great, because in the moment I am stuck with Khmer and ICU 2.6. Switching to 3.2 would solve the problems.
Jens
-- EE 77 7F 30 4A 64 2E C5 83 5F E7 49 A6 82 29 BA ~. .~ Tk Open Systems =}------------------------------------------------ooO--U--Ooo------------{= - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
