[HarfBuzz] Sinhala split matra

[Harshula]

Hi Behdad & Jonathan,

On Tue, 2012-11-13 at 12:40 -0800, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Jonathan and I decided to workaround the Sinhala issue with split matras and
> free fonts, such that they continue working with new HarfBuzz.  That's in
> master now.

1) GNU Free Font maintainer, Steve, went to a lot of effort to make
FreeSerif work with Uniscribe and the Harfbuzz behaviour we agreed to in
September.
(http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/harfbuzz/2012-September/002458.html). See SVN version of FreeSerif. He is also working hard to do a release soon.

2) You refer to "free fonts". Are you referring to GNU Free Font or to
the two GPL'd fonts that support Sinhala? One of them is deprecated,
there are problems with glyphs etc, and the other, FreeSerif, that is
meant to replace the former works well with Harfbuzz from a week ago.

3) The big win, from the behaviour agreed to in September, is that any
Windows font will just work with Harfbuzz. With the FreeSerif changes,
that meant that all maintained fonts just work. From the perspective of
actual Linux Sinhala script users, that increases their font options
significantly.

4) Commit 0736915b8ed789a209205fec762997af3a8af89c ([Indic] Decompose
Sinhala split matras the way old HarfBuzz / Pango did) has a bug. The
five fonts I test with do not render correctly now. I suspect no fonts
render correctly with current TOT Harfbuzz. i.e. A regression. Try කේ
(<U+0d9a><U+0dda>).

5) Since this is a FOSS project, any chance you and Jonathon could
elaborate a bit on the problem you guys are trying to fix and the
reasoning behind the decision to overturn what was agreed to in
September?

Thanks,
#