Salaam Abdulhaq, > > And in terms of the redundancy you > > mention, all of this dynamic substitution > > functionality is built into OpenType, it's not > like > > you're writing C++ code here. You can use > Microsoft's > > WYSIWYG tools if you wish. > > That's not true is it? My understanding is that it > is the responsibility of > the text client to inspect GSUB and GPOS tables and > to apply the lookups as > and when it desires. The font server does nothing > but supply the table info.
Doing the dynamic glyph substitution at the text client level would be a very redundant approach. Again, I am not that familiar with the way font are served in Linux, but in Windows all programs share Uniscribe functions to handle OpenType shaping behaviour. There is no need to write this code in the text client. For instance I can open up the dumbest text client in the world, NotePad, and still write Arabic text in elegant Quran'ic typography using the Arabic Typesetting font. Obviously NotePad knows nothing about complex Arabic shaping, it simply calls the Uniscribe functions for this shaping behaviour. > Therefore, it can involve a lot of C++ code in fact. > This code resides (in > linux for instance) in Qt, Pango etc. etc. What > about apps that don't use > these librarys or where the libraries are not fully > compliant? In order to support OpenType, you have to upgrade the text client to support OpenType, there is no other way around it. And yes it will take some programming to support OpenType. But once OpenType is supported then the text client can simply depend on a rendering engine to handle all shaping behaviour. > On Windows you have uniscribe to do the job if the > programmer accepts > default substitution behaviour. Is your solution > only for those willing to > pay the MS tax to view qur'aan;-)? No, of course not. OpenType is meant to be a cross-platform font format. This means that you can take the specification and implement it on any platform you wish. This Indian Linux group claims that they have succeeded in supporting OpenType on Linux, maybe you might want to contact them and ask for their help: http://www.ncst.ernet.in/projects/indix/technical_details.shtml They say they did this by adding OpenType font support in Xserver. So once OpenType support is part of the Xserver then text clients can simply call the necessary functions in Xserver to handle the shaping behaviour. Kind regards, Mete _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
