[HarfBuzz] hb-view and beyond

[Khaled Hosny]

Thanks Behdad, those utilities are very helpful for font developers as
well :)

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 01:36:39PM -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Note: There's still problems reading Unicode text from the command-line
> arguments.  You can use --text-file to work around that.

I just noticed that feature ranges assume byte not character count, e.g.
to apply a feature for first 10 Arabic characters I've to pass
[:20] not [:10], I can live with that but it wasn't obvious at first.

> Moreover, there is now an hb-shape binary also, which outputs shape results in
> a (cryptic) human-readable way.  I plan to add more verbose formats as well as
> JSON and XML too.  But for now, this is how it looks like:
> 
> 
> <uni0905=0+1602|uni092C=3+1228|uni0942=3 at 1,-174>
> 
> That is:
> 
>   - Glyphs are separated using '|'
> 
>   - The cluster value comes after '='
> 
>   - If there's X or Y offset, they come after '@'
> 
>   - If there is advance, they come after '+'.  Maybe I should change this one
> to '>' or something.

And it arrived just in time :) I was about to try writing something like
that to facilitate writing unit testing for my complex Arabic fonts.
Thanks very much!

> There are options to disable outputing the cluster value or the positions, or
> use glyph indices instead of glyph names.

It seems that --no-positions suppresses outputting clusters as well.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Egyptian
 Arab