On Wednesday 16 June 2004 19:30, Mete Kural wrote: > > 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.
Uniscribe is not magic, it's has an API that you have to use for all your applications to support OpenType. > 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. > That's what abdulhaq is talking about, calling Uniscribe API is not as obvious as it seems it still involves coding. Out of curiosity, what version of Windows are you using? I have been told that most applications doesn't support opentype tables For example, Office XP doesn't support any of the advanced features of OpenType (including layout tables) > > 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? > Abdulhaq, I'm interested to know about that, the last time I checked Qt didn't support OpenType layout tables at all. Not sure about Pango but I tried gedit and it failed to handle OpenType tables. > 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. > But you still have to embed all the necessary functionality in every font you make. > > 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. Supporting only Mac and Windows, they call it cross-platform and yes FreeType can handle a subset of it but still it has patent problems. To be honest, I don't want to rely on thus proprietary technology in something as standard as Unicode. (You are essentially handing the Standard to Microsoft and Adobe here) > 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. > I have heard of that but I think FreeType has better support. -- Mohammed Yousif Egypt _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
