[HarfBuzz] Thoughts on harfbuzz API

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12/04/2009 03:09 AM, Martin Hosken wrote:
> 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.

Thanks Martin.


> 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 *.

That may be true, but from a user point of view, I'd rather keep it as generic 
as possible.  Jonathan and I discussed also providing an integer API, and that 
most probably will happen at some point, but I want to keep the hb_shape() API 
as is.


> 2. Script and Lang
>
> Currently script and lang values are enums.

Are they?  Script is, but not lang:

typedef const void *hb_language_t;

hb_language_t
hb_language_from_string (const char *str);

const char *
hb_language_to_string (hb_language_t language);


For script, we need the Unicode script anyway.  Though we would allow, for 
example, providing the OpenType script tag directly too.

behdad


> Yours, humbly submitted,
> Martin
>
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