Re: Non-BDF Devanagari Support in Pango

[Mark Leisher <mleisher crl nmsu edu>]

    Owen> So, I suppose what we need is not just a way of storing ligature
    Owen> data client side, but also storing a mapping table client side, that
    Owen> maps the code points of the font into the code points of a sane
    Owen> encoding.  (I believe that for the BDF fonts, Robert used the
    Owen> Unicode encoding with some extensions to deal with glyphs that don't
    Owen> correspond exactly to characters.)

Well, there is only so much that can be handled by AFM files, so maybe it is
time to resurrect the simple rendering language that Malek Boualem and I
worked up for just such situations.

  http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/contextnew.pdf

With some simplification of the syntax and scope, it should just about fit
the niche.  Originally I had planned a GUI that would let users write
rendering programs visually by moving characters/glyphs around on the screen.
No time to pursue it though.

The basic idea is to provide a simple syntax that can be interpreted very
quickly - something in between the the too simple AFM format and the too
sophisticated OTP (from Lambda/Omega).

Other reasonable possibilities to consider are the little scripting language
they use in Keyman on Windows and SIL's Graphite system, which they might be
persuaded to make available.
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Mark Leisher
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