[HarfBuzz] Questions about interacting with HarfBuzz

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 12-10-10 08:48 AM, Lóránt Pintér wrote:
> Hi Behdad and Grigori,
> 
> Thanks for all the answers.
> 
>>> I finally managed to get OT layouting with HarfBuzz to work in JavaScript via
>>> Emscripten. It's awesome! :) There are still some open questions though. Can
>>
>> Fantastic! Got any demos?
> I've attached a small sample of what my thing produces (it's called from Flash
> here---I know, I know, it's a /bit/ overcomplicated. :). Sources I can't show
> for now, but will try to do so ASAP.

Nice.

I found your harfbuzz-js tree on github and took a look.  I highly recommend
that you don't bind the *.hh files.  Those are internal.  The public API is
anything that gets installed by "make install", which happens to be *.h.



>>> * *Can HarfBuzz handle the Apple "kern," "morx" etc. tables?* If not, is
>>> it safe to use FontForge to convert these fonts to use OpenType's
>>> GPOS/GSUB etc.? This is not very
>>> encouraging: http://fontforge.org/gposgsub.html
>>
>> No 'morx'. And as you noted, the conversion is not straightforward.
> I see. So, no Zapfino then?
> 
> On a more serious note, is support for "morx" planned? Is the lack of support
> due to some fundamental incompatibility with HarfBuzz architecture, or is it
> because nobody did the work yet? In case of the latter, would you accept
> contributions if my company made this? (Not sure if we really would, but I'm
> interested in the possibilities.)

It just never was priority.  That seems to be changing a bit, since it looks
like OpenJDK may also be interested.  So I added it to my TODO list for the
rest of the year.  We'll see how far I get!


>> Can't help without seeing the code / font. Did you try the code in C first BTW?
> Not yet, but I will, and report back with my findings.

I talked to the emscripten maintainer.  He thinks this should not happen
unless you turned unsafe optimizations on.  Definitely report it.

Cheers,
behdad