Re: Non-BDF Devanagari Support in Pango

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Chookij Vanatham <chookij vanatham eng sun com> writes:

> Hi Robert, Owen,
> 
> Should Pango be able to support all necessary various kinds of fonts
> even the ultimate goal font is OpenType ?

Well, the ultimate goal is to support whatever fonts people have.

> ] This is something that needs discussion. In an ideal world we'd just
> ] use OpenType's Indic support. Short of that we could
> ] 
> ]   * add support for arbritrary X properties to TTFs, make the X TTF
> ]     backend understand this.
> 
> Can we have this done before Pango 1.0 out (by when ?) ?

I don't even know how we would go about doing this one, and it doesn't
correspond to the future direction for TTF and X, which seems to be
client-side fonts.

> ]   * recognise the font automatically (based on encoding?) and then pass a
> ]     hardcoded PANGO_LIGATURE_HACK in...
> 
> This approach will require "Pango devanagari engine" to keep all those
> various hardcoded PANGO_LIGATURE_HACK, right ?
> 
> Will this approach require any change in TTFs ?
> 
> Will this approach be taking less time than the above one ?

I think the best approach for this is to have a configuration file 
that has something like:

[XLFD pattern]:[PANGO_LIGATURE_HACK_DATA]

And have Pango read that in and use it in addition to the ligature
data found with the font.

> May be, it will be done before Pango 1.0 out. Right ?

I think that the above approach is simple enough to get done in 
the next few weeks, which is the basic timescale for what will
be going into Pango 1.0.

Regards,
                                        Owen