[HarfBuzz] Unified Text Layout Engine?

[Simon Hausmann]

On Friday 02 February 2007 14:59:35 Lars Knoll wrote:
> On Thursday 01 February 2007 21:20, Andreas Vox wrote:
> > Am 01.02.2007 um 20:38 schrieb Eric Mader:
> > > Hi Behdad,
> > >
> > > The ICU LayoutEngine uses an abstract base class to represent fonts
> > > and so is independent of any particular font format or OS. (Though
> > > the model in the base class assumes that a font contains tables w/
> > > four-byte names. ;-)
> > >
> > > I've thought for some time that the Indic shaper code in ICU is too
> > > fragile. When I wrote it, I though I could get away with a single
> > > routine to analyze and tag all Indic scripts. Since then, I've
> > > found out that there are lots of script-specific exceptions and
> > > it's sometimes hard to fix one script without breaking any of the
> > > others...
> > >
> > > A couple of years ago I talked w/ Owen Taylor about rewriting the
> > > code to have a (potentially) different shaper for each script. At
> > > that time I thought that almost all the bugs were fixed and it
> > > wasn't worth the effort. Subsequent experience has shown this
> > > belief to be optimistic. :-)
> >
> > So if neither Pango nor ICU like their own Indic shapers, maybe Qt
> > can provide
> > theirs? Is their any news regarding copyright transfer?
>
> We are absolutely willing to do so. It's not even a legal issue here, just
> a matter of finding the time to do the work. Things have unfortunately been
> a bit more busy than we expected here in the last month.
>
> Simon and myself just need to find a few days of time to sit down and do
> the actual work.

Just a quick heads-up on this: We've started working on this last week and 
have the Qt shapers mostly up and running inside Harfbuzz. We just need a few 
more days for further cleanups.

Simon