Hi Arne,

>> Currently OOo uses the defaults of the underlying font systems (e.g.
>> Win32 API, Uniscribe, Freetype, ICU) for this. The document's locale
>> is not yet fed into these systems so at best just the system's local
>> is available to these subsystems. As far as I know only the Win32 API
>> supports this.
> 
> freetype 2 also does.

What would that freetype2 API call be? Are you confusing "support for
different encodings" with "locale specific glyph selection"?

> [...]
> Ok, I'm not sure about the details here... I'm using Linux, not Windoze,
> so I don't know how printing works on Windoze systems. But on Linux you
> usually generate a PostScript or PDF file and send this to the printer.
> This has the advantage that you can embedd the fonts from the system
> and even do the rendering first. So, no need for the printer driver to
> replace the fonts. :)

I know how OOo's printing and PDF export works. ;-)
Until either freetype or ICU do the locale specific processing we have not
yet allocated resources to implement all desirable features ourselves.

> One possible solution wold be to only support OTF features on systems
> which have the necessary libraries installed.
> I use 'fontforge' to work on my fonts and 'fontforge' is currently the
> only application I know which supports all the OTF features. It also
> uses freetype 2.

I use and like fontforge too. Freetype2 there is only used for displaying
the glyphs and byte hinting... but not for creating or parsing the OT
tables.

> What is urgently needed are the following features:
> * 'anchor' support for latin characters and 'combining diacritics' in
> Unicode. These are used to correctly align combining diacritics to
> their base characters and also to stack diacritcs onto each other. This
> is used for example in Vietnamese and Taiwanese. Vietnamese also has
> corresponding codepoints in Unicode, but Taiwanese has not. Those
> characters need to be composed by combining diacritcs.
> The 'anchors' are defined in the font, a base anchor in the base glyph
> and a mark anchor in the combining diacritc character. The anchors then
> 'glue' together.

Vietnamese processing would be the responsibility of the ICU layout engine.
http://bugs.icu-project.org/cgibin/icu-bugs/returned?id=2384 says that it is
supported. I don't know if the "Fixed by changes for canonical processing"
comment in there means, that the 'anchor' support is there... OOo 2 will
still use ICU's version 2.6 anyway.

> * vertical alternatives to select vertical varients of (mainly
> punctuation) characters in CJK languages (but also others).

GSUB's "vert" OT subtable are the only OT tables we parse ourselves, because
they are too important to ignore them.

> * stylistic alternatives (salt) to select other presentation forms
> independend from the document language.
> 
> * alternatives by language tag.
> [...]

OOo's new Canvas is designed to allow the use of advanced OpenType features.
Implementing the infrastructure for it is just SMOP (simply a matter of
programming :-). The UI to the optional OT features needs to be specified
first.

--
Herbert

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