On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Antoine Leca wrote:
> En Vadim Plessky va escriure:
> >
> > | > > And presumably FreeType2 will have, or acquire, the smarts for
> > | > > rendering the Arabic and Indic scripts properly.
> >
> > I am wondering *how important* those Arabic and Indic scripts?
> > While there is a certan number of people living in those countries, I doubt
> > that they have a lot of computers, and nuymbe rof *Linux* users from that
> > number is quaestionable, too.
> To add another complexity, there is no current agreement about the way to
> encode Indic fonts. Besides proprietary glyph-based encodings (that clearly
> do not scale up), the Apple scheme looks like a dead way, so the only
You may or may not be right about AAT and ATSUI
(http://developer.apple.com/intl). As long as Mac is alive,
they'll live on. BTW, there's a third contender, Graphite
developed at SIL.
> "solution" I see is the OpenType scheme, which fits more or less with
> Unicode (but lags about 6-8 years later), and is initiated (and as I see
It seems like support of Indic scripts in OTF has been rapidly emerging
and MS Windows 2k/XP has a pretty good support of a few Indic scripts
using OTFs and Uniscribe. More and more Indic scripts will be supported
as time goes by. I heard that there are lots of talented programmers/font
developers on MS's typography list(?) interested in OT fonts for Indic
scripts. Besides, I don't think Pango is much behind Uniscribe supporting
Indic scripts with OTF.
> things, still currently "owned") by Microsoft, something that is not really
> welcome in the Linux community ;-).
I'm not sure what you mean by 'owned'. Opentype standard
has been developed jointly by MS and
Adobe.(http://www.microsoft.com/typography) I don't think Linux
developers/users are so stubborn to reject anything invented by MS. Pango
developers are certainly not because they've been working to support
Indic scripts with OTF(as you know well: Pango 1.1.1 now supports
Indic scripts with code ported from ICU.) Neither are developers of
XFree86 and Freetype library and the author of Yudit.
> As a result, I do not believe that efforts for the Indic scripts are
> likely
> to be successful for the very next years: this is probably more of a
> long-term project; consequently, I believe that Indians will continue to
> use English when speaking with computers for a few years...
As far as Linux-console is concerned, I agree with you. However,
on the GUI front, I'm not so pessimistic as you're because we already
have some tangible results. IMHO, Linux can't afford to lose hundreds
of millions of potential users in South Asia when competing OS like MS
Windows 2k/XP and MacOS X are moving forward on the front.
Jungshik
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