[HarfBuzz] Sinhala split matra

[Harshula]

Hi Behdad,

On Thu, 2012-11-15 at 00:12 -0800, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> I'll reiterate the HarfBuzz development philosophy and what happened about
> this Sinhala issue. =
> 
> As far as I'm concerned, when I say, on behalf of HarfBuzz, that "we don't
> support X", what I mean is: "we currently don't support X, and we currently
> don't plan to support X, but we may do in the future."

hehe

> And I think that's
> quite representative of most Free Software / Open Source projects.  I don't
> think we need to explain why we changed designs.  We did, because we found it
> more suitable for our users.

So who are these Sinhala script users that say this is more suitable?

> Now to the specific issue at hand: From what I understand, in the
> August/September release of HarfBuzz, we broke some fonts that used to work
> with old HarfBuzz / Pango.  Those fonts were NOT working correctly with
> Uniscribe.

You broke two fonts (one deprecated and the other was later made to work
with Uniscribe) that worked with Pango/ICU but it meant fonts made for
Uniscribe automagically worked.

> Back then, we decided that we only want to support the
> Uniscribe-correct fonts.  Now, in November 2012, based on various input
> (Firefox, Chrome Linux, GNOME), 

Did you get any input from Sinhala script users?

> we decided that we want to support both
> categories of fonts: those that work fine with Uniscribe, and those that used
> to work with old HarfBuzz / Pango.  I don't see how that can be a limitation
> to a user.

Really? Would both those groups of fonts work at the same time in, for
example, a Libre Office (using HarfBuzz) document?

> As such, I have no interest in arguing about how that decision was
> made, and I don't think it's relevant to any user of HarfBuzz.  If you have a
> font that is not addressed correctly with HarfBuzz as is, let us know and we
> will try to accommodate that.

Did you notice that fonts made for Uniscribe now have a subtle rendering
error without the environment variable? Try out කෝ with a font made for
Uniscribe. For example, try:

http://www.icta.lk/attachments/1090_winnie.ttf
http://www.icta.lk/attachments/1090_WARNA.ttf

If you can accommodate both groups of fonts at the same time by default,
that would be great.

cya,
#