[HarfBuzz] Lemongrass HarfBuzz Hackfest, end of day 4

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 07/23/2012 11:54 PM, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> wrote:
>> With HarfBuzz Indic shaper, our goal is to track Uniscribe shaping as closely
>> as possible (while it makes sense).
> 
> Hi -- while I note your words within parans, I wonder why you have
> chosen Uniscribe as the standard? Is it simply because it is widely
> deployed? Despite MS's QA, there *might* be problems in Uniscribe's
> rendering (I don't use Windows 7 so I'm not sure about its rendering)
> -- in which case would the bug have to be fixed in Uniscribe first
> before it can be done for HB? (Mind you, I'm just wondering here,
> since I haven't actually run into such a sequence...)

Because there is no other authoritative source.  The OpenType specs are simply
not enough.  And Pango / HarfBuzz.old / ICU implementations are buggier than
you want to know.  So, for now, Uniscribe is the reference, but we do depart
from it on a case by case basis when it makes sense (ie. we think Uniscribe is
doing something wrong and we can do better.)

behdad