[HarfBuzz] Using HarfBuzz to get final glyphs

[Pierre Marchand]

Vous (Kenichi Handa) avez écrit :
> In article <200803210219.58386.capparis at free.fr>, Pierre Marchand 
<capparis at free.fr> writes:
> > > But as your case and the case of others illustrate, there is a need
> > > for an Open Source library that makes it easy to process
> > > OpenType features  -- and possibly do so in a manner quite independent
> > > from the usual high-level Pango/Gnome or QT/KDE
> > > APIs.  Ideally, such a library would have been fleshed out completely
> > > several years ago as part of FreeType, but that obviously did not
> > > happen.
> >
> > To be honest, I first worked with libotf from m17n project and would have
> > continued if Scribus team would not has stated that  they want to use
> > Harfbuzz. So we can say there is at least one free OpenType library out
> > there even if, from my point of view, raw OpenType processing could be
> > done in Freetype directly.
>
> FYI:
>
> We implemented a pango module using the m17n library that
> uses Harbuzz via Pango API.  Behdad said that the module
> will be included in Pango itself in the comming version.
>
Money goes to money :(
If I do understand that Pango is very appealing for people whose working on 
internationalization, I can’t be delighted to see all efforts focused on a 
project which is not toolkit-independant.
I think I need to put something on the table. If OpenType aims to address a 
lot of issues with non-latin scripts, do not forget that it’s also (and if 
you have a look at catalogs of foundries, I would say "mostly") a way to 
facilitate the use of typographic refinements in latin scripts. To tell 
things in their bare truth, here in West part of Europe, "shaping" is a 
mystery word. But when it comes that even space adjustments (aka kerning) are 
not applied because our preferred DTP application just does not handle 
OpenType features, we think there’s something wrong, not to mention being 
forced to do S&R to have standard ligatures or dig into PUA to find oldstyle 
figures or even worse not being able to reach small caps, etc., etc.
So what. If we need a library that helps all projects to provide decent 
internationalization (and I agree it’s the most important), we also need 
(maybe in Freetype itself) a library which allows typographic fanatics to do 
their work. And it would not be very clever to write yet another library to 
do that while there is HB_Buffer, which is great, though under documented :) 

> At the same time, we implemented a code that directly uses
> Harfbuzz to drive OTF features for various scritps such as
> Indic, Thai, etc.  But, as it was told that the Harbuzz API
> was not yet fixed and it's too early to work on such a
> feature, that work is suspened at the moment.
>
I would be very interested to read this. Is it available in any way?
By the way, thanks for the m17n database, if I have not yet figured out how to 
get the rules (lisp(is(not(my(mother(language)))))), at least I could import 
catalogs to form dictionaries for Fontmatrix own shaping experience.


-- 
Pierre Marchand