[HarfBuzz] hb-view

[Jjgod Jiang]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 12:17 AM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> wrote:
> As promised, I pushed out the initial code for a hb-view cmdline tool.
> There's a thousand things missing right now, but it's a good start.
>
> In particular, in the near future I want to do:
>
>  - Somehow be able to set script and direction.  For script, I'm currently
> thinking about making harfbuzz internally scan for the first non-Common script
> in the string if the buffer script is set to HB_SCRIPT_COMMON.  That should
> work fairly well for simple cases.  For direction, it's harder.  HarfBuzz
> internally knows about native horizontal direction of scripts, so I like to be
> able to use that.  However, that would require adding either HB_DIRECTION_NONE
> or HB_DIRECTION_WEAK_LTR/RTL/....  I can't make up my mind about this.
> Suggestions?
>
> An alternative would be to 1) add a full-fledged script iterator to HarfBuzz,
> 2) use FriBidi to do real bidi.  That would make the tool much more usable at
> the cost of requiring FriBidi.
>
>  - Add support for PS/PDF/SVG output.
>
>  - Port to glib option parsing.  Hopefully people don't mind the glib use, right?
>
>
> Also a design question: should the tool require all the ingredients (freetype,
> cairo, glib, fribidi?) and do a perfect job, or if some ingredients are
> missing it should just use fallbacks, which would result in inferior output?
> For example, if glib is missing, you wouldn't get the Unicode funcs, if
> fribidi missing, no bidi.  I'm leaning towards always-correct output.  Makes
> the tool much easier to use as a debugging tool.
>
> Later on, perhaps add json/xml output too.  Or would that be better done in a
> separate tool?
>
> Any other comments?

Shouldn't the background color by default #FFFFFF instead of #000000?

- Jiang