RE: Pango status, urdu support

[Karl Koehler <koehler or uni-bonn de>]

Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
> So my question is, would it be interesting to create a *-muelarabic-3 with
> those missing chars; or instead use a completely new font encoding 
> for exemple the one used by TTF fonts done by IRNA (they have only arabic
> letters; no latin ones; an example is attached

My $0.02 on this topic is: do not create an own font-encoding !
There are too many around already. If the font-encoding you mention suffices
for your needs, I'd regard it best to use that. 
I see one prblem though: If I run ttf2bdf on such a ttf-font, the order
of characters seems different. What am I doing wrong ? 
I do want to have a bdf-font to test width.
Could someone mail me a correcly encoded bdf font ?

If you indeed want a font that encompasses everything why not use
the unicode ( iso10646-1 ) encoding ?



On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Shahbaz Chaudhary wrote:
> Also, someone once mentioned that Pango, once completed, will not be able to
> handel nastalique urdu font.  Is that true (perhaps some background on
> that...)?

Well, at the moment pango cannot handle this type of font. But it is not
true that it is impossible to handle. 
I just did not write code to do it, mainly because :
* this font has -Symbol-0 as encoding  ( So does not seem standard ).
* I don't know Urdu, so that was not my top priority .
* Up till recently, I was not even aware of this font for the 
  aforementioned reason.

best regards, 

		Karl