Re: Clustering rules (was Re: Adding tis620.2533-0...)

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

> I'm not very happy about any of the solutions that have been proposed
> so far, because they involve separating the font from the clustering
> rules that need to be used for the font.
> 
> This is going to present significant headaches for users, in having
> to create configuration files that describe how each font should
> be clustered and maintain them as they add new fonts.

Can't that info be obtained from the fonts ?
Maybe requesting the metrics of some carefully chosen glyphs and doing
some arithmetics with will allow to know for which clustering scheme
the font has been created ?

It is obvious that if it needs user intervention it won't work (majority of
users surely haven't the foggiest idea about what their fonts use)

> I'm already concerned that the configuration for Pango with the
> pangox-aliases file is not easy enough. I don't want to make this
> worse.

about the pangox-aliases; it could be made easier by removing the need of full
X11 names... the foundry, font name and encoding should be enough.

Then, also the addition of "complementary aliases" would be good too.
What I mean by complementary aliases, is aliases for those charsets that
are not available for all fonts; eg:

Helvetica=*-msgothic-jis*,*-gulim-ksc*
Times=*-mincho-jis*

Rhat is, when "helvetica" is choosen by the user, if a japanes string must
be displayed, the "msgothic" font is used, and for korean string the gulim
font is used.
That is, a database of fonts that go well together for different scripts.

That will allo easy and straightforward use of pango.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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