https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=4638
--- Comment #30 from JC Ahangama <[email protected]> --- There are three objections to my suggestion that Write should follow the OT Standard when treating Standard ligatures. The first objection is that the request is too trivial to bother about. The next two objections are specifically directed against my solution for Indic scripts. My solution eliminates complexities of Unicode Indic leveling the languages with Western European languages tremendously helping to reduce illiteracy in India. My solution does not violate any technical or linguistic standard but upholds them. I have demonstrated that Indic can be romanized without loss or distortion. This fact is proven by simply displaying romanized Singhala in the native script by using an orthographic smart font. You test by phonetically typing the text. The objections are as below. Objection 1 -- Trivial issue It is indeed trivial for those who see no difference between implementation of Standard ligatures and no ligatures at all. This is the case with users of the Latin script except some who think there are language level ligatures. What they do not realize is that Write actually interferes with the display of ligatures prematurely or unnecessarily. There is no requirement in the Standard to prevent display of Standard ligatures provided by a font. They should show by default. In the case of Desktop Publishing software, you provide options to the author for selecting non-standard ligature types. Objection 2 -- The language of the text cannot be discerned from codes Although it sounds technical, no engineer would say it because they know immediately that there is no definitive way to identify languages just from the underlying code set because many languages share the same script, notoriously, Latin. The way to identify the language in the case of web pages is simple. The language tag will tell. (e.g. lang="en-US"). In other cases, you compare frequencies of character codes to known code frequency charts of languages and increase the confidence level by identifying frequently occurring words. (Google won't confuse Singhala and Indonesian / Icelandic if they do this). Objection 3 -- Rendering large number of ligatures is math intensive and could cause the computer to crash Again, this is not a statement by an engineer. A font responds to a keystroke by supplying the drawing coordinates and glyph drawing instructions. If the glyph returned is a base character, add the Advance Width of the already painted glyph to its origin of coordinates to get the origin for the new glyph. If the new glyph is a ligature, the existing origin is the origin of the new glyph as well. You might wonder if a font full of ligatures would paint the text faster everything else being equal. (Mixed Singhala text with my font is already 98% ligatures and shows no difference in performance. Mozilla in 2008 reported that the difference is 2% without saying which way). ===================================== My plea is simply to get rid of code that handles OT features that I suspect relies on the OS, and to reserve them for an advanced version of Write, may be WriteAndMore made for desktop publishing. Trusting Uniscribe in Windows adds a level of unknown which, in this case, is faulty. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the issue.
