On 09/05/05, Stefan Baums [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Dear Paul and Mark,
I'm not very familiar with OpenType/fonts, or editing them, so
I'd have to defer any changes to Mark.
let me explain the problem a bit more. In any program where you
don't explicitly configure a separate font for every script under
the sun, which means pretty much anything but Mozilla, including
all GTK+ and Qt etc. programs, one main font is chosen (say,
Bitstream Vera Sans), and whenever the program encounters a
character (say Kharoh) that is not covered by that main font,
it asks the fontconfig library to find a font that does contain
glyphs for that character, and then automatically gets them from
there.
The problem is that a) fontconfig does not know very much about
the capabilities of fonts apart from what glyphs there are in
there, and b) it prefers fonts with a broader script coverage
(thus determined) over those with a more narrow coverage. That
means that on a system with
Mark's Damase font (with glyphs for many scripts, but no
OpenType mechanism for Kharoh, Limbu, hPhagspa etc.),
and
a tobedeveloped specialised Kharoh font (with glyphs for
only Kharoh, but proper OpenType support)
fontconfig, when asked to provide for Kharoh, will prefer the
Damase font over the specialised Kharoh font, thus causing
broken rendering for Kharoh text even though a font for proper
rendering would have been available. (As far as Kharoh is
concerned, this is a bit theoretic at this point, since the
specialised font does not exist yet, but may already affect Limbu
etc. users.)
Limbu text isn't messed up in my font. True, there are no opentype
tables, but if you think that is actually as big a problem as it is
for Kharosthi, you are very wrong - I was actually /thanked/ by some
Limbu guy in Nepal for having the first Unicode font to support his
language, and on top of that he did not make any bug reports. From
what I know about Limbu, complex shaping requirements are minimal and
text can be read almost as easily without them.
As regards Kharosthi, although it may not display properly, I am
pretty sure that text in Kharosthi in my font is still readable,
although it definitely doesn't look good and is probably very
difficult and irritating to read.
I think it's similar to the way that many Chinese linguistics journals
write Mongolian script horizontally due to typographic limitations,
and nobody makes a big fuss.
In addition, if I did have the OT tables for Kharosthi, I don't
believe there is any support in _any_ OS for some of the complex
rendering nessecary for the language.
I'm also under the impression that the situation of hPhags-pa is
similar to that of Limbu, although I don't know much about the script.
This has been discussed on the fontconfig mailing list, and
somebody suggested that fontconfig should check for OpenType
support, but it's not sure that that is going to happen. At the
same time, the usefulness of a nonOpenType Kharoh (Limbu,
etc.) font for actual users (academic or native) is very limited,
since all one can do with it really is typeset an alphabet table,
but not any connected run of text. That's why I suggested that
removing Kharoh, at least from the Debian package, may be the
best thing to do at this point, pending potential future
improvements in fontconfig that would mean that fonts with partial
support can no longer negatively impact fonts with full support on
the same system.
I highly disagree. If you are interested in publishing a newspaper in
the language, then you are indeed correct - it would not be
acceptable.
But if you are using it in a scholarly document otherwise writtten in
English, the Kharosthi should still be perfectly readable - it's in
the wrong direction, yes, it uses an ugly control symbol where there
should be conjunct consonants, yes, but for me at least English is
still readable when written backwards or upside down, and Arabic is
still readable when written using all isolated forms (although it is
irritating, after a while it becomes easier to read).
And regarding Limbu I must protest again: I'm pretty sure there are no
problems big enough with the current Limbu rendering that somebody
would not want to use it to print a newspaper.
And of course this situation sucks, because it discourages
enthusiastic developers who want to get started somewhere, but
don't have the time or resources to go all the way with
replacement tables and everything. In our research project, at
the moment we also use nonOpenType Kharoh fonts, with just the
basic glyphs in the codepoints, and the composite glyphs in the
PUA, and everything has to be handpicked. But that's a
specialised internal use, and having a font distributed as part of
Debian is a different issue, especially if it impacts multiple
scripts. Sorry if all that sounds a bit negative.
discourages enthusiastic developers who want to get started
somewhere - if
