Re: Pango and SILGraphite

[Edward Cherlin <cherlin pacbell net>]

On Thursday 23 January 2003 03:03 pm, Yung-Fong Tang wrote:
> Dear Owen:
> I pay a visit to SIL International last Monday to Wed. I have the same
> thought as you do before I pay the visit. And after I visit them and
> browse throguh their library, I totally change my mind. There are many
> many many many many many scripts that they are working on are not
> encoded into Unicode yet. 

Well, there are only about 30 live writing systems covered by Unicode, and 
about half have decent software support. (Which half depends on the operating 
system you favor.) About half of the included writing systems are in the 
complex rendering category, namely the Indic and Indic-derived scripts of 
South and Central Asia.)

>And they are live scripts. The economic return
> value of them could be small right now. 

I reckon that decent support for those scripts would be better for the 
countries concerned than several billion dollars of direct aid or 
conventional investment in supporting economic growth, education, health, and 
other useful purposes.

> But they are people using it (may not in computer yet).

The Simputer project has designed an inexpensive Linux handheld specifically 
for sharing among poor people in India, using local languages. It is being 
adapted to the needs of other developing countries. Sharing brings the cost 
per person down by a significant factor. Pango and Graphite, or some 
combination of both, could substantially speed up adoption of computers in 
many countries.

> If you don't believe it, pay a visit to Dallas to SIL and ask them to
> browse thorugh the books they have in their library.... You probably
> won't believe what you see there.

Second the motion.

> Owen Taylor wrote:
> >To state something that may be a bit controversial, my opinion is that
> >the set of "hard" scripts out there is pretty finite, and not going to
> >go up in the future. Rather than trying to make it possible to handle
> >arbitrary new scripts, I think time would be better spent creating the
> >necessary specifications, fonts, and code to fit the dozen or so
> >remaining complex scripts into OpenType.
> >
> >(The set of live scripts in Unicode that Pango doesn't handle for
> >OpenType fonts, is, to my knowledge: Sinhala, Lao, Khmer, Mongolian,
> >Tibetan, Syriac, Hanunoo, Buhid, Tagbanwa. As far as I know, the
> >set of arguably live complex scripts not yet encoded in Unicode is
> >pretty small too.)

Do we have suitable fonts for all of the supported live scripts? ( which Owen 
implies includes all nine Indic scripts and Burmese.)

So is it easier to code modules for these nine scripts plus any others that 
may turn up, or to make use of a general-purpose engine that requires the 
design of some font tables in order to support a new script? The complexities 
of the script have to be encoded somehow, whether as program or data, so it 
is not clear whether either approach really saves work. However, there are 
other issues.

According to SIL's experts, several of the complex scripts, such as Burmese, 
cannot be rendered completely correctly from TrueType or ordinary OpenType 
fonts. SIL has created a new kind of table to add to its own OpenType fonts, 
and has been discussing the possibility of getting those tables added to the 
OT standard. I don't know the technical issues that SIL is concerned with, so 
I would like to see some examples from them. I don't think we can make a 
proper decision on how to proceed without that information.

-- 
Edward Cherlin
Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more
"A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
--Alice in Wonderland