Questions about the font shaping tender

[Khaled Hosny]

I just came across this tender [1] and it is not quite clear to me what
is it about. Am I right in thinking this is about having a shared
cross-platform implementation of VCL text layout API (the dreaded
SalLayout et all)? If so I don’t understand what AFM stuff is doing here
since we don’t use any of this AFM stuff during text layout as far as I
can know and I don’t see how it can even be reused for such a task.

1. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2015/12/16/tender-for-cross-platform-fontshaping-stubs-for-layout-tests-201512-05/

Regards,
Khaled