[HarfBuzz] Harfbuzz for OT only

[Martin Hosken]

Dear Jonathan,

In a message somewhere buried in the mozilla archives, you mentioned that you saw the model for character processing as having different engines for different smart font technologies and that harfbuzz should be the one for OpenType.

While this looks simple on paper, my fear is that the engines for the other technologies are not going to get implemented, or if they do, that people aren't going to implement the non-trivial selection mechanism to choose between them. Would it be beneficial to add the selection mechanism and therefore 'shapers' for the other technologies to harfbuzz? This of course requires that the other technologies give their results within the limitations of OT rendering, but I feel that would be a better solution than not to have any support for them.

What do you think?

Yours,
Martin