[HarfBuzz] Font introspection tool

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi Khaled & Jonathan,

Here's another idea.  Now that HarfBuzz shaper is fairly complete, we've been
adding lots of what I call introspection APIs.  There's some more to add, but
after we're done it would be possible to write a tool that takes a font and
generates a PDF that exposes most of the font's complex features (ligatures,
mark positioning, alternate glyphs, etc).  I think such a font would be really
helpful in reviewing fonts.

Since we don't have a good layout engine other than TeX, there are two ways to
write such a tool:

  * Write it in C++ and generate XeTeX input...

  * Just write it in XeTeX directly.

The second makes a lot of sense, except that:

  1) We need to expose the HB introspection API in XeTeX first,

  2) We all know how fun programming with (La)TeX is...

So, what are your thoughts?

Cheers,
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/