[HarfBuzz] Thoughts on harfbuzz API

[Martin Hosken]

Dear All,

I'm in the process of writing a python wrapper to help with testing harfbuzz before hopefully integrating Graphite. This gives me a good way to review the API :) and here are some thoughts.

1. Features

Currently a feature in hb-shape.h is defined as an association between two char * over a range. My understanding of all smart font technologies is that they work with longs. So I would suggest making the name and value entries unsigned longs rather than char *.


2. Script and Lang

Currently script and lang values are enums. I can sort of understand script being an enum from a default block based run segmenter. But given, again, fonts use long tags for this. I would suggest making them open ended either as char * or as unsigned long. This is particularly true for the lang tag and I would suggest it as a more helpful way to go for the script tag too.

Yours, humbly submitted,
Martin