Re: [I18n]Re: U+3000 limit

[Keith Packard <keithp at keithp dot com>]

Around 19 o'clock on Jan 8, "Chahine M. Hamila" wrote:

> That said, I'm afraid the use of any X font server is not as much the
> problem as the availability of the necessary glyphs for shaping Arabic in
> standard XFree86 clients or servers.

Yes, the existing XFree86 supplied X output method mechanism probably isn't
sufficient to support Arabic, especially when drawing words along a
diagonal baseline.

There are several other mechanisms available; modern X toolkits all avoid 
the existing Xlib code for their own more capable implementations.

OpenType fonts contain quite a bit of layout information; if that's 
sufficient for your needs, I believe the FreeType project is working on 
exposing that data to applications; Xft is the X layer on top of FreeType 
that would let you get at that data directly.

> I can't insist more about the importance of their presence for Arabic.

We're all aware of the need for additional layout information for many
languages; I'm working to move XFree86 towards an environment where
applications get access to the complete font file so that X itself needn't
understand all of the layout complexities -- applications (or toolkits)
will simply read the font files directly, using either FreeType or some 
other font library.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        Compaq Cambridge Research Lab