On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 17:02 +0100, Ralph Aichinger wrote: > Hello! > > I am playing around with various font formats lately (on Gnome > as well as on Windows) and I am wondering if the current > state of OpenType support for european languages is documented > somewhere. > > Some programs seem to have some support for .otf flavoured fonts > (e.g. gedit), some don't (AbiWord, OpenOffice). OpenOffice has it's own font handling code and doesn't really use fontconfig. It's quite a mess. Someday, someone will dive in and port it to Pango. Note that even gedit isn't perfect ... gnome-print (what gedit uses to print) can't currently print OpenType/CFF fonts. Don't know about abiword offhand. > Is it reaonable to file bugs with programs not able to use > .otf (or TrueType-flavoured OT) fonts? wouldn't hurt. > Is it planned to support the more "fancy" OT features, > à la InDesign, like ligatures for latin alphabets, small caps, > oldstyle figures or stuff like linking glyphs in script fonts > like in the new version of zapfino? > > http://www.linotype.com/6-2326-6/zapfinoextra.html > > Will there be system-wide support in pango for features > like these one day? If the feature can't be supported without extra UI, it's unlikely to be supported systemwide. So, context-sensitive ligatures and alternate forms? GPOS tables for accents? Yes, hopefully. Manually chosen swash forms? small caps? Less likely. Though I would like to see Pango have the necessary API so that applications that want to expose these features to their users can add the UI. Regards, Owen
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