Re: Font priorities

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh sharif edu>]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Eric Mader wrote:

> At 07:27 PM 2/4/2003, Stefan Baums wrote:
> > [...] On the other hand, I guess Pango
> >_could_ assemble the Arabic from presentation forms in the fonts
> >available... but I'm not really Arabic.)
> 
> The way I handle this in the ICU LayoutEngine is with a canned GSUB table 
> built from the Unicode character database. [...]

We somehow need to do this in Pango. There are widely-distributed fonts
that have the presentation forms but not GSUB tables. For examples, see 
below:

The situation is a little funny with people here that install a full Red
Hat 8.0 system and then (after hearing that Red Hat 8.0 is Unicode-based)
try typing Arabic in the default text editor without installing any font.
They find that they can get Arabic but only disconnected letters...

The source of the problem was the font 'zysong.ttf' shipped as a part of
Red Hat's 'ttfonts-zh_CN' package. It has glyphs for Arabic presentation
forms but no GSUB tables. Unfortunately it was only licensed to Red Hat 
and for distribution only, so I couldn't fix it for them...

roozbeh