Re: Pango-1.7.0 released [unstable] and Myanmar/Burmese

["Edward H. Trager" <ehtrager umich edu>]

On Saturday 2004.12.04 14:57:22 +0000, Christopher Fynn wrote:
> Edward H. Trager wrote:
> 
> >Hi, Owen,
> 
> >The inclusion of Lao and Syriac is great!
> 
> >What about Khmer? I thought the KhmerOS people had said
> >that the Khmer rendering module would be merged into 
> >Pango 1.6, but I did not see it there.
> 
> >Also what about Burmese? Is anyone working on Burmese via
> >OpenType, or does Burmese really require SIL's Graphite, and if
> >so is anybody seriously working on SIL integration into Pango?
> 
> >Just curious. -Ed Trager
> 
> One problem is that it seems Microsoft have neither implemented any 
> support for Myanmar/Burmese in Uniscribe nor published a script specific
> spec for Myanmar/Burmese as they have for many other scripts:
> <http://www.microsoft.com/typography/SpecificationsOverview.mspx>.
> 
> While, in absence of such an implementation or spec, one can go ahead 
> and define a set of features appropriate for Myanmar/Burmese based on 
> the features used for similar scripts and build fonts & support in Pango 
> based on this set - there is no guarantee that this set of features will 
> correspond to the set of features Microsoft eventually specify for 
> Myanmar/Burmese. My fear is that this could lead to all sorts of 
> incompatibilities between fonts and OpenType shaping engines
> somewhere down the line.
> 
> In this respect AAT/ATSUI or SIL Graphite may be a better choice for 
> building fonts and rendering support for scripts like Myanmar/Burmese 
> right now since with these formats shaping rules can be built into the 
> font itself and you don't have to rely on a specified set of script 
> specific routines in the shaping engine.

Thanks for this information, Chris.

It has been pointed out to me that Apple's AAT/ATSUI "got it right" 
BUT it is not Open Source.  Graphite, on the other hand, is Open Source.
And I believe that many people feel that Graphite also "got it right".

So Linux people should forge ahead to support Graphite.  SIL already
has a Graphite-enabled font for Myanmar.  To me that means that a lot of
the really hard work (creating such a font is really hard, tedious work) is done,
or at least well on its way to being done (SIL's Myanmar font is still
beta level, if memory serves me correctly).

Owen, what are the technical obstacles of integrating Graphite into Pango?
Frank Yung-Fong Tang has the http://sila.mozdev.org/ project to integrate
SIL into Mozilla.  But I don't see anything newer than 2003 on this site.
Is this a project that fizzled out or died?  And why integrate SIL Graphite
only into Mozilla, instead of directly into Pango or ICU's layout engine?

As a sort of "political" commentary, Linux need no longer "play second fiddle"
to Microsoft.  Why wait for Microsoft to publish an OpenType spec for Myanmar
if SIL Graphite is fundamentally more flexible and better anyway?  Linux has 
already beaten the pants off Microsoft in many arenas --including the arena of
internationalization and localization.  But I don't think everyone has realized
this yet.  Both Gnome and KDE are already localized
to a much greater degree in a lot more languages than either Windows XP or
Apple ever will be (due to the simple fact that it is faster and easier to localize
open source software).  So why wait for Microsoft to define a standard for
Myanmar when SIL and Graphite can do it today?  

-- Ed Trager