[HarfBuzz] Google SoC and harfbuzz

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, Daniel Glassey wrote:

> Hi guys,

Hi Daniel,

> I have an idea for an SoC project involving harfbuzz.
>
> At the moment harfbuzz is for the raw opentype bits. As part of that
> library or a different library in the same project would it be good to
> share as much as possible of the shaping code between pango and Qt?

I had a similar idea, but never got to think about it in details.
Another thing currently missing (at least in Pango) is proper
fallback when fonts don't have certain features (say kern, mark,
mkmk, ...)  We currently have a fallback implementation that is
only used (sometimes never used, depending on the backend) if the
font has no OpenType features.  I think we need a more
fine-grained fallback mechanism.


> I know there would be licencing issues (LGPL pango and GPL/Commercial
> Qt) but if that could be traversed would you be interested in
> something like that?

The license is indeed a problem.  The current license of HarfBuzz
makes it usable in both Pango and Qt, but limits possibility of
moving code from Pango's shaper modules to HarfBuzz for example.


> It would be up to the student to design something that could be useful
> to both pango and Qt.

That's the hard part.  Unless you specifically have somebody in
mind that can do this, I don't think we will get any qualified
applications.


> I guess an appropriate mentoring organisation would need to be found as well.

That's not the hard part.  I'm willing to mentor such a project,
and I think we can get Lars to help too.  GNOME will be happy to
host it.  Feel free to add the idea here:

  http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2006/Ideas


> Regards,
> Daniel

Cheers,

--behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
	-- Dan Bern, "New American Language"