Re: improvement of font selection

[Kenichi Handa <handa m17n org>]

In article <Pine LNX 4 58 0603130649510 5730 epoch cs>, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu> writes:

> I am curious what made you to write the patch originally.  What
> problems does it solve for you.

For instance, to display Tamil, I'd like to use akruti1b.ttf
font which have a proper OTF tables for Tamil, but I also
have FreeSerif.ttf which contains many glyphs including
Tamil but not sufficient OTF tables.  And, it's not
decidable which font (akruti1b or FreeSerif) is tried at
first by Pango (without listing fonts carefully in
fonts.conf).

In such a situation, ideally, pango/modules/indic/indic-fc.c
can provide a proper "covers" function that returns
PANGO_COVERAGE_EXACT for akruti1b but
PANGO_COVERAGE_FALLBACK for FreeSerif by checking the font
contents.

But, to enable such an improvement, the patch I sent is
necessary as you see.

Another reason for the change request is that we are now
developping a multilingual library m17n-lib
(http://www.m17n.org/m17n-lib), and it contains CTL (complex
text layout) rendering facility.  We can provide a pango
module using this library (single module can render many
scripts), but in that case also, the same problem happens.

>> If the discussion on my patch will mainly be done on bug CC
>> (instead of gtk-i18n-list), I'll subscribe to it.  But, as
>> I'm quite overloaded, I'd like to avoid subscribing to
>> unnecessary mailing list.   Could you please advise me?

> Yes, the discussion is done on bugzilla, but you are not
> subscribing to any mailing lists, just to that specific bug and
> you will only get comments added to that bug.  You need to create
> a GNOME bugzilla account first and add your email address to the
> CC of the bug.

I see.  I've just done it (I hope I did it correctly).

---
Kenichi Handa
handa m17n org