[HarfBuzz] hb-view

[Sebastien Metrot]

Hello Behdad,

If you plan to add a dependency to glib, do you think there is a way to make that optional? I already use an alternative implementation of the bidi algorithm (UCPGA, "Pretty Good Bidi Algorithm", from the UCData lib) and I'd rather not have to deal with glib as it is notoriously hard to build on non unix platforms. I confess, however, that I have no idea how it compares to fribidi.

Regards,

S.


On Feb 23, 2011, at 12:17 AM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> 
> 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?
> 
> Cheers,
> behdad
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