[HarfBuzz] Library similar to HarfBuzz to shape mathematical equations?

[Khaled Hosny]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 12:23:32AM +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:11:08AM -0800, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > On 12-11-14 08:59 AM, Lóránt Pintér wrote:
> > > Sorry for the off-topic question, but is there maybe a library similar to
> > > HatfBuzz that can be used to shape/layout/format mathematical formula?
> > > 
> > > What I would like is to provide the input in TeX or MathML format, and get
> > > back something similar to hb_buffer_get_glyph_positions().
> > 
> > There used to be GtkMathMLView.  That's not exactly what you want though.
> > Maybe we should start one...
> > 
> >   http://helm.cs.unibo.it/mml-widget/
> 
> I'd be interested in helping with such an effort, I already started
> cleaning up GtkMathView (on a private fork) a while ago to prepare it
> for OpenType math support, would there be any interest in HarfBuzz
> providing an API to read MATH table? (I think it might help a bit with
> porting Gecko to OpenType math that some Mozilla MathML people seem to
> be interested in). That would be a good start, a full math engine in
> HarfBuzz would be nice, but it might be too much I think, given the
> complexity of math layout.

To elaborate, I intend to port XeTeX to HarfBuzz (after giving up on
LibreOffice ;) since and HarfBuzz using ICU LayoutEngine will not work
for XeTeX (because of the way it is using the layout engine), but we
also use some private API to read MATH table on our own, so if HarfBuzz
provided an API to read MATH table that would help greatly.

Regards,
 Khaled