Re: What is the status of OT handling in pango?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Petr Tomasek <tomasek etf cuni cz> writes:

> I'd like to ask, what is the status of OpenType advanced features
> (like GPOS and brothers;).
> 
> I'm asking because of handling hebrew text with accents; there
> are now two unicode hebrew fonts freely available, which one of
> them at least uses these advanced OpenType features to do the
> vocales/accent positioning (The "SIL Ezra" font released recently.
> The second font is the "Cardo" unicode font, which I don't know,
> if it uses these features.

The core OpenType is pretty complete. Support for actually 
using OpenType support is shaper-dependent - currently in
the Arabic and Indic shapers only. 

Adding the appropriate support to the Hebrew shaper shouldn't
be that hard, especially if the current heuristic positioning
code can be avoided entirely for such fonts.
(see http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/hebrewot/shaping.htm
for a specification of what would need to be done.)

> BTW, is there any tool, that can tell me things like this about a font?)

The latest version of Just van Rossum's ttx/fonttools is supposed
to have quite complete OpenType support, though I haven't had
time to look at it yet.

 http://sourceforge.net/projects/fonttools/

Regards,
                                        Owen