Ian,
As I mentioned before, I think this is an issue with fribidi or the font
that you are using. I have seen nothing that indicates that this is a
mapserver problem other than the implied suggestion that maybe mapserver
should find a different library to solve this issue.
Did you post this issue on the fribidi list?
Did you post the response back here?
I saw that you tried the text in other windows products and it works. I
can appreciate your frustration with this fact, but this does not in
itself mean the mapserver is broken. We rely on fribidi and the selected
font to generate the correct glyphs for rendering. If the gylphs are not
rendered correctly there are a few possibilities:
1. a bug in mapserver - not likely as we have plenty of working examples
using multiple other languages
2. a bug/limitation in fribidi
3. a font file with missing or broken glyphs.
In most cases of rendering problems that we have seen to date have been
problems with fonts. The fribidi list has been helpful identifying good
fonts for specific languages.
If you want to file a bug on the mapserver site, goto
http://mapserver.org/ and follow the link on the top right of the page
to the issue tracker. You will need to supply a test case that
demonstrates the problem and some graphics so non hindi readers can see
what is bad and what is expected.
Without some more clear evidence that this is a mapserver problem, I'm
not sure this will get much action.
I am sympathetic, as I ran into a similar issue with Arabic a few years
ago and had to do this whole dance with fribidi to understand the issues
and identify a font that resolved the issues.
-Steve W
On 4/4/2013 11:12 AM, Ian Walberg wrote:
Folks,
Added the dev list, how do I raise a ticket on this?
Thanks
Ian
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ian Walberg
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2013 2:34 PM
To: Stephen Woodbridge; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] Rendering Hindi Characters
Hello again list,
The Hindi rendering problem has come to the top of our priorities again and we
have been investigating the cause of the issue again.
To recap the problem we are seeing can be reproduced easily, paste Mexico City
into google translate and then use the Hindi characters with any Unicode font.
The top (incorrect) line of text is from mapserver and lower (correct) line is
from Excel in this image http://tinyurl.com/cs7pax5
From the research we have done freetype does not know how to render all of
these characters together correctly. It does appear that pango can be
configured to render them correctly.
I have not yet dived into the details of the rendering pipeline and I hope that
someone can jump in and confirm we have a real issue and there is not something
stupid we have done.
Many thanks
Ian
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stephen Woodbridge
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 5:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] Rendering Hindi Characters
FYI, Mapserver does not do anything for rendering text except:
1. pass the text to fribidi which converts a utf8 sequence of characters into a
"displayable" sequence of characters.
2. mapserver then passes that to the text rendering function of whatever
renderer you are using.
Mapserver does not try to understand it, it totally relies on the underlying
rendering code to do the right thing whatever that is.
Thomas Bonfort might have some more insight into this as he re-engineer a lot
of the rendering pipeline and it might be helpful to know what code is doing
the actual text rendering. It used to be freetype and may still be.
I'm also not convinced the fribidi is not the right place for this to happen regardless
as it is responsible for taking a sequence of characters and generating an
"displayable" sequence that can be rendered correctly given the correct font.
-Steve
On 1/23/2013 7:17 PM, Mr. Puneet Kishor wrote:
Peter,
My guru in all things Hindi fonts tells me that the problem lies at the level
where encodings are converted into font renderings. Apparently, र् ट is a
perfectly correct alternate rendering of the unicode, just not Correct (with a
capital C). I have no idea where this happens with MapServer. Thankfully I've
never had to create a map with Hindi labels (I would be curious to learn,
perhaps off-list, who wants to see maps with Hindi labels), but I too would
like to see this resolved.
Hope someone knowledgable chimes in.
On Jan 23, 2013, at 3:58 PM, "Mr. Puneet Kishor" <[email protected]> wrote:
(adding the list back to cc so brains better than mine may help)
On Jan 23, 2013, at 3:47 PM, "Peter Mallen" <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Puneet,
I have passed the codes you have provided into MapServer (U+0930 U+094D U+091F
) and it displays the characters separately, not as one character.
This is how Map Server displays it: र् ट
hmmm... well, then this is definitely above my pay grade. Seems like you are
doing the right thing, but my guess is MapServer's Unicode implementation is
not working properly.
I don't see any mention of Unicode on mapserver docs page. The only
potentially relevant bit I see is
(http://www.mapserver.org/installation/unix.html#obtaining-the-necess
ary-software) that libgd should be compiled against the iconv library
which provides full support for Unicode. On my MBA I get
$ ~ > gdlib-config --libs
-lXpm -lX11 -ljpeg -lfontconfig -lfreetype -lpng -lz -liconv
Thank You,
Peter Mallen
-----Original Message-----
From: Mr. Puneet Kishor [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 3:36 PM
To: Peter Mallen
Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] Rendering Hindi Characters
On Jan 23, 2013, at 3:00 PM, "Peter Mallen" <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Puneet,
I did try feeding MapServer the correct Unicode characters, and it did fix the characters
using what I believe is called the "Reph" symbol (ि) but I could not get the
conjunct consonants to display correctly.
I have no idea what the above means ;-), but, did you try passing
U+0930 U+094D U+091F to MapServer? See
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0900.pdf
U+0930 -> र -> r
U+094D -> ् -> "halves" the previously typed r 091F -> ट -> thick t
U+sound
Also, I have posted on the fribidi list and I believe it does only help with
bidirectional languages, but I could be wrong.
Thank You,
Peter Mallen
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mr.
Puneet Kishor
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 12:27 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] Rendering Hindi Characters
On Jan 23, 2013, at 12:17 PM, Stephen Woodbridge <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 1/23/2013 2:20 PM, Peter Mallen wrote:
Hello Everyone,
I am having issues rendering certain Hindi characters. I am using
UTF-8 encoding.
When attempting to display the following Hindi character in
MapServer: र्ट
It is rendered in MapServer as the following two characters: र् ट
I believe these characters form what is called a conjunct
consonant, of which there appear to be thousands of and most of
them do not render using MapServer.
Also, It appears that MapServer is having an issue displaying
these conjunct consonants and wants to display these characters
separately rather than to form them as one combined character.
Here is a link describing more about the Devanagari alphabet:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/devanagari.htm
Can anyone please help with this?
Thank You,
Peter Mallen
Hi Peter,
I can not speak to this specific problem but I can give you and overview.
Mapserver uses fribidi library for rending this data and I know from working
with Arabic that a lot depends on the font you are using, in additional to the
capabilities and version of fribidi library.
Isn't fribidi specifically for bidirectional languages? Hindi is strictly LTR.
This kind of question is probably best asked on the fribidi list as they will
know more about what is supported or not for any given language and they might
be able to point you to a better font.
http://www.fribidi.org/
You should probably make sure you are using a recent version of the library
like 0.19.2 or better and be aware the 0.19.5 was released in Dec 2012.
Peter, I forget where you and I left our off-list conversation re. the issues
you were having with rendering Devnagari. Did you try feeding MapServer the
correct Unicode characters?
Hope you figure this out.
--
Puneet Kishor
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