On 12-12-18 06:16 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote: > 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.
Ok, makes a lot of sense. Humm. There are JSON LaTeX (and ConTeXt!) package out there I assume? That would kill multiple birds... > JK > > -- behdad http://behdad.org/ _______________________________________________ HarfBuzz mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/harfbuzz
