Hi On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Arthur Reutenauer <[email protected]> wrote: >> PS, on the dev-luatex mailing list >> (http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/private/dev-luatex/2009-January/002217.html), >> you doubted whether freetype2 will be sufficient for advanced fonts, >> and in fact ft2 have most of the features you want: > > From the list you made below, it seems that it doesn't because > OpenType support belongs to HarfBuzz, as has already been said. > FontForge already does all of that. >
I know that project, and the idea is mentioned in the first mail of this thread. Yes, FontForge solve all the problems FT2+HarfBuzz do, but: - HarfBuzz+FT2 is more lightweigh/memory/computational efficient than Font Forge. - FT2 has been tested by thousands and thousands of software programs (it is the basis of Unix GUI program + handhold device GUI + many Windows and Mac Apps). - HarfBuzz, though not public released, is the key component of Pango [a part of GTK+] and Scribe [a part of QT application framework], so it also has been tested by many software programs (All GTK+ and QT program use HarfBuzz for text layout). So, FT2+HB are the quasi-standard of the software world, This approach is more robust and has much fewer bugs. If there are sufficient funding, write such binding is beneficial. Of course, I admit FontForge is useful in LuaTeX, and can solve many problems FreeType cannot solve (like font generation). >> So I think it is possible to write a similar binding. >> Maybe we can apply for a Google SoC project for this? > > TUG's candidature to GSoC has been rejected > (http://tug.org/pipermail/summer-of-code/2009/000164.html), so, not this > year. bad to know that:( > > Arthur > Yue Wang
