[HarfBuzz] Layout engine and vertical paragraphs

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 05/17/11 06:52, eduardo wrote:

>>> Would I need to separate the text in different scripts
>> Yes.  And do bidi, line-breaking, etc.
> 
> That's somehow confusing to me. ICU works in the same way and there should be
> a good reason, but I don't understand were the point is. Usually the client
> has no knowledge about the text, and it just need to know what glyphs to draw
> and in what positions. Why cannot the client simply provide the whole
> paragraph and let ICU/HB to deal with multiscripting, Bidi, etc?

In that case use Pango.  HarfBuzz is a much lower level library that can be
used as a building block to build a text layout system.  By itself, it only
provides shaping for a single run of text.


>> Checkout src/hb-view.c.   That doesn't handle multi-script though, but you get
>> the idea.
> 
> It looks easier than ICU.
> 
> ICU completely lacks functions like hb_ft_font_create which must be done by
> hand. And it seems that somehow hb can guess the script of a string without
> forcing the client to analyze it which is great (at least for single-scripted
> text).

The guessing part is just for testing.  Don't trust it for anything real.

behdad


> The problem is that I have no idea about how to compile it in Windows. But I'm
> going to open another subject for that.
> 
> Thanks and best regards!
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