[Fontconfig] Thaana / Divehi support (was Font related bug, unresolved)

[Owen Taylor]

On Sat, 2005-07-23 at 02:08 +0100, Skywalker wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been using linux for a while and have been unable to use 'dhivehi' fonts 
> or 'thaana script' in any linux distro. Problem appears to be that X does not 
> have a suitable keymap for dhivehi fonts. 
> 
> On the other hand, on most mircsoft applications, people who use thaana script 
> (in the Maldives) can use most of the word processing applications amongst 
> others. Regarding this i have posted a bug 3176 
> (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3716) on 2005-07-06 and have 
> not recieved a reply yet.
> 
> Keeping in mind that the developers must be really be busy, I'd like to know 
> what else I can do to bring this issue to the attention of the developers.

I don't think this has anything to do with fontconfig ... fontconfig
should be able to handle Thaana fonts without any changes.

You'll get a bit better support from fontconfig if you add a Divehi 
"orthography" to fontconfig .. adding a file div.orth to
fontconfig/fc-lang with the appropriate Unicode ranges.

But that's a lot more important for languages that use a variant of
a different script. For a language like Divehi that has an unque
script, it won't matter much.

Though I think you could get OK rendering of Thaana without any special
rendering support, to fully support OpenType Thaana fonts, you would
need support in the rendering layer: for instance a Pango module.

See:

 http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenType%20Dev/thaana/intro.mspx

For what needs to be supported. This wouldn't be a very hard module
to write, and you could ask for volunteers on gtk-i18n-list at gnome.org

Are the freely distributable Thaana fonts available?

The question of X keyboard maps is a messy one, and I'm not really
in a position to help you here. What might help in convincing someone
to help you with that would be a pointer to a Divehi keyboard layout
and information as to exactly how input works.

Regards,
						Owen

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