On 18/12/12 22:23, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
Hi Khaled & Jonathan,
Here's another idea. Now that HarfBuzz shaper is fairly complete, we've been
adding lots of what I call introspection APIs. There's some more to add, but
after we're done it would be possible to write a tool that takes a font and
generates a PDF that exposes most of the font's complex features (ligatures,
mark positioning, alternate glyphs, etc). I think such a font would be really
helpful in reviewing fonts.
Since we don't have a good layout engine other than TeX, there are two ways to
write such a tool:
* Write it in C++ and generate XeTeX input...
* Just write it in XeTeX directly.
The second makes a lot of sense, except that:
1) We need to expose the HB introspection API in XeTeX first,
2) We all know how fun programming with (La)TeX is...
I'd favor some form of the first approach: write a tool in C++ (or
Python or Perl or whatever) that uses the HB API to inspect a font and
generate a "data dump" in some simple marked-up format that can then be
pretty-printed by running it through xetex with an appropriate set of
macros to handle layout, etc.
I wouldn't aim for such a tool to generate entirely "raw" xetex input
that directly contains every detail of formatting control; more likely,
generate data tables in some sort of LaTeX markup (sorry, ConTeXt
people, but LaTeX is far more widely used and understood!), and then
have a "template" LaTeX document and style that wrap the data tables
with appropriate page layout control.
JK
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