From: Szelp, A. Sz. <a.sz.szelp_at_gmail.com> > On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Stephan Stiller > <sstiller_at_stanford.edu>wrote: > > > > > This is interesting only if the encodable elements would be different - > > remember, Unicode is not a font standard. > > > > +1; rendering can be so much more complex than encoding. I'd really like > > to see a successful renderer for Nastaliq, (vertical) Mongolian, or > > Duployan. (What *are* the hardest writing systems to render?) > > > > > Vertical mongolian does not seem to be harder to render _conceptually_ > than, let's say, simple arabic. It's more the architectural limitations of > rendering engines that seem to limit its availability, and the intermixing > with horizontal text. For Nastaliq, Thomas Milo's DecoType is miraculous: > it's hard, but given the good job they did, obviously not impossible. — > Well, I don't know about Duployan. > > /Sz
I guess this is my invitation to chime in. I'm close to releasing a beta of a Graphite engine for (Chinook repertoire) Duployan, using a PUA encoding. By the release of 6.3/7.0, we should have a working implementation of Unicode Duployan/shorthand rendering for Graphite enabled applications. Like a Nastaliq implementation, it's convoluted and involved, but not impossible. It will not, however, be nearly as beautiful as DecoType; I'm not a designer at heart, and a Duployan implementation as stunning as Milo's Nastaliq will require the skills of people several orders of magnitude more talented than I. -Van Anderson
