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

[Christopher Fynn <cfynn gmx net>]

Edward H. Trager wrote:

> 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".

AAT / ATUSI is "Open" in the same way that "OpenType" is - in that the
specification is published and anyone can build an rendering system that 
takes advantage of AAT / ATUSI tables in sfnt fonts.

Graphite was was specifically designed to be extensible in order to 
handle the needs or minority scripts which may not even be encoded in 
the Unicode Standard - or for minority languages which may use 
non-standard behaviour for the scripts they are written in.

> 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?  

"Better" may be too strong a word. It's a lot more work to develop 
Graphite fonts since the tables are inherently more complex and the 
tools to make them are not as easy to use. Graphite fonts are likely to
need a lot more testing and debugging as well.

No matter how much support for Graphite gets put into Linux, there are 
always going to be many more OpenType fonts available for complex 
scripts - so I'd see Graphite's prime usefulness to be for handling 
scripts and extensions which OpenType doesn't cover.

<http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&cat_id=RenderingGraphite> 


> 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?  

Yes. Graphite support would be particularly useful for minority 
languages and scripts never likely to be supported by Microsoft or 
specified in the OpenType spec. - and for scripts like Myanmar which, 
although they have many users, are unlikely to be added to the OpenType 
spec for many years.

- Chris