ØÙØÙØÙ ØÙÙÙÙ Reading the discussions about Unicode / Quran and then some of Thomas's very interesting pdfs such as http://www.tradigital.de/specials/studies/iuc20c.pdf and hearing about his ACE arabic font technology gave me a mad idea which I'd love to start implementing. I'd love to hear other peoples ideas about it and if they think I could get people involved etc.
Long-term Goal: provide a GPL general purpose font renderer along the lines of xfs which would render arabic encoded strings (not just character glyphs) - in a 'beautiful' way. Ideas: 1 - a font format which is based on algorithms (shaping and ligature-like constructs) and not simply strokes of the pen. Interestingly postscript is already similar to this in that a font is a program. However, I don't think it supports the type (in terms of algorithm) of glyph shaping I have in mind. As a consequence the font file format could be based on e.g. OpenType, but with any modifications required. 2 - each character could have a number of extra parameters such as in-point and out-point (or delta between the two), 'centre-of-gravity' type of thing and other shape control features. By changing the parameters the actual glyph would change (on-the-fly). The parameter settings for each character could be part of the document's character encoding (as a sister file to the main unicode encoding maybe?). The font renderer would of course have to have some default parameters for each glyph as 99.999% of editors will not understand them but output (and understand) plain unicode only. 3 - a specialised 'calligraphy' editor supporting the font renderer for advanced use, allowing fine detailed control of possible rendering variations. 4 - Using the codebase in fontforge as an example, it may be possible to create algorithms that on-the-fly create Type-1 compatible glyph instructions but which are entirely tailored to their context. Current postscript font renderers such as the one in xfs could then be used for the actual glyph rendering. 5 - technology such as Qt could be patched to pass strings where possible rather than individual characters to the font renderer. This is perhaps a lot more difficult than it sounds but would be fundamental to the general applicability of the project. Would it be a 'calligraphy' type app only, or an engine that would be widely used? I personally couldn't bear to start a project of this size on a non object-oriented language, so C++ springs to mind as the appropriate language to use. As I said, I would be very interested in other people's thoughts (is it impossible etc). Shoot me down in flames, whatever. Alternatively, maybe we could persuade Thomas to GPL (for the GPL platforms) his Arabic Calligraphy Engine ;-) Ù ØÙØÙØÙ ØØØ ØÙØÙ wassalaam abdulhaq _______________________________________________ Developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/developer
