Re: opentype features (ligatures)

[Greg Aumann <Greg_Aumann sil org>]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
>>Until this script is encoded in the Unicode standard it may be
>>difficult to get OpenType shaping engines like Pango to properly
>>support it.
> 
> 
> Indeed, your are right.

It will be difficult to get opentype shaping engines to support it but
another alternative is to use silgraphite (a project on sourceforge).
This has a module pango module that will provide all the necessary
shaping provided there is a font with graphite tables in it. Tools and
documentation for building graphite enabled fonts are included in that
project.

There is more information about graphite here:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&cat_id=RenderingGraphite

Graphite shaping is actually more capable than opentype shaping and it
doesn't require script specific support from the shaping engine. The
biggest problem is that few applications support graphite. The
availability of the pangographite module helps quite a bit with this.

Also graphite has been ported to openoffice (linux only I think). There
was a binary of openoffice 1.1 with graphite support available on
http://scripts.sil.org. That seems to have disappeared probably because
they are getting ready to release the openoffice 2.0 version.

Greg