On 03/09/2011 08:55 AM, Andersen, Jan wrote: > Sorry for posting this here, where it is almost certainly not appropriate, > but I don't quite know where to ask, and I suspect some of you guys probably > do. So, this is my question: > > I work a lot with Chinese, and need to be able to display the full range of > CJK characters in Unicode; unfortunately that exceeds the capacity of all > current font specifications (that I know), and I would like to see if I can > do something about it. After all, when you display a character, what you need > is to take your character representation (eg UTF-8) and look up a glyph - if > things are reasonably sensible, it ought to be fairly doable to replace that > part from somewhere and replace it with, say, a database interface. But where > do I even begin to understand font-handling in X? > _______________________________________________ > [email protected]: X.Org support > Archives: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg > Info: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg > Your subscription address: [email protected] >
I don't think things are quite as dire as you suggest. It should be possible to put together on one system a set of fonts that cover all the Unicode points you need. Here is one start to finding those fonts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_typefaces The major parts are: Fontconfig. Given something to display, find a font that contains a way to display it. Freetype. Do the mechanics of looking in font files to map Unicode to the glyph definition, which in the case of a scalable font is expressed as lines and splines. Pango, Harfbuzz (part of Pango), Qt. Do the mechanics of laying out glyphs along a particular path, taking into consideration writing direction, kerning. _______________________________________________ [email protected]: X.Org support Archives: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg Info: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg Your subscription address: [email protected]
