[HarfBuzz] Arabic and diacritics: problems with Arial and Arial Unicode

[Andrew Cunningham]

On 12 July 2011 08:20, Evan Martin <evan at chromium.org> wrote:
> This is the hack we did in Chrome (to the old Harfbuzz):
> http://codereview.chromium.org/543067/
>

Hack is the right word .... the link says:

"Arabic vowels in some fonts (Times New Roman, at least) have
non-zero advances, when they should be zero. Pango does a hack very
similar to this to work around the same problem."

Personally I would expect Times New Roman 3.x fonts  to have non-zero
advances ... but would expect Times New Roman 5.x fonts to have zero
advances.

The hack seems to be about making fonts that weren't designed to
handle diacritics to work, rather than focusing on using the new
versions of fonts or fixing fonts.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Senior Project Manager, Research and Development
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au
lang.support at gmail.com