Re: Gnome 2 Screenshot - Tamil Xft rendering seems broken

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Vikram Subramanian <glueview yahoo com> writes:

> Hi,
>    This is Vikram, who submitted the last patch to the
> Tamil Pango Module(from a different email ID). I
> stumbled across this GNOME 2 screenshot from
> developer.gnome.org. 
> http://greebo.homeip.net/gnome2.png
> 
> This has a nice screenshot showing Anti-Aliased
> Rendering of HELLO.utf8 under gedit, with Tamil
> rendering broken :-(
> 
> Seems none of the characters in the ligature block got
> rendered.I wonder where the person got the TTF fonts
> from.

I'd guess the font is Microsoft's Arial Unicode, which presumably
encodes Tamil using the OpenType Indic set of features rather than the
block of characters in the PUA.
 
> The last time around Pango couldn't load more than one
> TTF font for rendering using Xft.So has this changed? 

Yes, this has changed; if a list of fonts is specified in your
XftConfig, then it will use the first matching font for each
section. So, if you have a windows installation that your XftConfig
points to, something like:

match any family == "sans"		edit family += "Verdana";
match any family == "sans"		edit family += "Batang";
match any family == "sans"		edit family += "MS Gothic";
match any family == "sans"		edit family += "MingLiu";
match any family == "sans"		edit family += "Arial";

Will give you rendering with Verdana, with fallbacks to the 
other fonts. 

You should also be able to do:

style "user-font"
{
   font_name="Arial,Kochi Mincho 16"
}
widget_class "*" style "user-font"

In your .gtkrc, but this seems to be broken right now. (Probably
very simple to fix, will look into it.)
 
> Is there be some change required to the Tamil Xft
> module?

Well, it would be nice to support the OpenType Indic stuff :-), I
don't have much of a feeling for how much work that would be ... all
the necessary OpenType parsing code should be there, but isn't
necessarily tested at all.
 
> What should I do to get it the Xft rendering properly
> working for English and Tamil at the same time.
> 
> BTW anyway knows the person who owns the above
> screenshot?

greebo.homeip.net is the machine of Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com>.

[ Note that there are other rendering problems with that screenshot ..
  none of the Indic languages are right, though the ones other than
  Tamil may "look right" superficially. That's the problem with
  things like Pango; you can get screenshots that look cool to everyone 
  but the people who speek the language ]

Regards,
                                        Owen