[Fribidi-discuss] BiDi WINE status and fribidi

[Shachar Shemesh]

Hi all,

First, I am new to this list. I'm sorry if I'm asking something here 
that was answered a while back. Didn't have time to go over all the docs.

As most of you know, I am currently trying to add BiDi to WINE. I was 
trying to do that by dynamically linking with fribidi. Unfortunetly, 
this approach was rejected by Alexander, because he feels the fribidi 
interface will not be sufficient for all possible future Wine needs, and 
he does not want to add dependancy on a library, push that to all 
maintainers, and then have that dependancy removed at a later date if a 
reimplementation is necessary.

I expressed the sentiment that this will push the Wine BiDi development 
~half a year back, and he replied with the harsh truth that were many 
people waiting for this, I would have managed to get more developers 
working on it :-(

The main limitations we feel prevent Wine from using fribidi are:
A. fribidi's use of UTF-32, vs. UTF-16 by Windows.
B. Lack of support for out of bounds overriding of character types (the 
lpClass parameter of the GCP_RESULTS struct of GetCharacterPlacement. If 
anyone is interested in the full details - 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/gdi/fontext_4l84.asp)

Unless we create two distinct implementations of libfribidi, I fear that 
the best approach for dealing with A is to create a WINE only fork of 
fribidi. B is just something to consider if you indeed want to revise 
the fribidi interface 
(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=790237&forum_id=3189).

Your voices and opinions, please.

                    Shachar