Re: Combining characters

[Jungshik Shin <jshin mailaps org>]

On Sat, 6 Sep 2003, Anuradha Ratnaweera wrote:

> > > particular font is a general requirement.  Therefore, I wonder why is it
> > > necessary to write shaper modules for each character set.
> >
> > Simple. Because there's no mechanism in Pango by which an external
> > mapping file is refered to extract the mapping between a sequence of
> > Unicode characters and a sequence of glyphs. I guess it'll be never
> > written because Pango is going to drop support for X11core fonts (or the
> > X11 driver is going to be maintained as it is now with minimal bug fixes).
>
> Ok.  That means, I have to write a pango shaper anyway, right?

  Hmm. what I tried very hard to get through to you is that you'd be
better off NOT spending your precious time tweaking with 15-year old
X11 core fonts. It's high time to move on to more advanced font technologies
I mentioned in my previous email.  Please, read materials at URLs
I gave in my messages (one at gtk-i18n and the other at XFree86 font list).

> Next question is, will I have to write seperate engines for other
> toolkits (QT/Xforms etc) as well?

  Qt already does very well with opentype fonts (try Kedit
or other Qt applications and see how well it supports Indic and other
complex scripts) and it even supports mulitple diacritic marks stacked
over a single base character(Latin/Greek/Cyrillic) that is not yet
supported by Pango.

  Jungshik