Re: Font Technology for Pango

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Chookij Vanatham <chookij vanatham eng sun com> writes:

> Hi Owen,
> 
> Seems to be that all the shaping rules for complex text scripts, particulary,
> Devanagai, should be in the font.
> 
> I guess that, in the industry now, OpenType font would be the best font
> technology. I don't know much about this technology yet. Just curious if
> Pango is having the plan to use this technology and how soon would that be
> possible ? or any other clue ?

Well, Robert Brady just recently commited his patch for Indic
ligatures using BDF fonts, so we now have pretty good support
for bitmap fonts for a wide range of Indic languages.
This is all probably that we'll have for Pango-1.0.

But, yes, we should be moving to OpenType after that. 
The things that need to happen to extensively deploy OpenType
are:

 - Get GTK+-2.0/Pango-1.0 out

 - Freely redistributable fonts of decent quality

 - Widespread adoption of the xrender extension so that we can do fast
   client-side fonts. (Not essential, but its how I'd like to
   outline fonts support for GTK+ 

 - Write the FreeType/OpenType-based shapers

The last one is not a negligable amount of work, but probably
the smallest factor in these. An optimistic date for everything
besides the fonts would be 6-9 months, but I really have
no clue when all the pieces will fall together.

Regards,
                                        Owen