[HarfBuzz] Using HarfBuzz to get final glyphs

[Sebastien Metrot]

Steve,

I'm in quite the same position. From what I understood, harfbuz is  
used in QT4.x so I have downloaded the sources and started to have a  
look at how the lib is used. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to  
make any sense of what I have seen yet. May be you'll have more  
chance? I have already tried to post a call for help on this list but  
my previous message have been totally ignored :-(.

Anyway, it sounds like HB should be able to do what you are looking  
for at least partially.

I'm interested in your experience ;-)

Cheers,

Sebastien


On Mar 18, 2008, at 10:48 PM, Steve Mills wrote:
> We're looking at options for updating a 3rd party library (AGL from
> Alphamask, now dead, so we maintain it ourselves) we use for cross-
> platform rendering of vector objects, bitmaps, and text. Right now it
> does not allow for any of the nice OpenType features such as
> ligatures, contextual glyph substitution, etc. This is because it only
> knows how to do 1:1 character->glyph lookups, then caches those
> glyphs. So what I need to do is possibly rip out this caching scheme
> it uses and find something that will give me a final list of glyphs
> with all possible glyph substitutions in place (depending on which
> options the user wants to use, of course). We can then either use our
> existing method of rendering the glyphs (get the path with ATS), or
> possibly let some other system such as HarfBuzz create and cache each
> glyph's bitmap that we'll then blit to our drawing surface.
>
> So, can HarfBuzz do this? We already use FreeType in our server
> products, but we need to handle the OpenType features on all platforms
> (Mac, Unix's, Solaris, Windoze, etc). It's very disappointing that
> they didn't extend FreeType to do this sort of thing. I've spent
> nearly an hour looking around the HarfBuzz site and being thoroughly
> confused by trying to learn how to use yet another wiki and yet
> another source repository, seeing lots of links that go nowhere
> helpful, and generally not finding a lot of documentation on how to
> use HarfBuzz, so I'm a bit burned out right now.
>
> _________________________________________________________
> Steve Mills                              Me: 952-401-6255
> Senior Software Architect                         MultiAd
> smills at multiad.com                       www.multi-ad.com
>
>
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