Re: xft ? arabic shaping ?

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Mohammed Sameer <uniball at gmx dot net> wrote:
> 
> 1) Lately I was converting my openbox patch to pango instead of xft
>    to render arabic.

<plug>
If you're looking for a window manager to play with try Fvwm2
(http://www.fvwm.org); it handles Arabic without issue :-)
</plug>

> 2) As you all noticed, gtk-webcore <gtk-webcore.sf.net>, a khtml gtk
>    port has been released.
>
> Xft doesn't shape strings by itself, and I think that it doesn't apply
> the bidi algorithm too.  Now I don't really know, but I think that this
> is a limitation, now it's impossible to,
>
> 1) run, have a look at every new application and implement shaping in it.
> 2) Ask all the developers not to use xft and use pango instead.
> 
> Now what ? Should we fix xft by introducing bidi and shaping ? I'm
> afraid this might break Pango, simply breaking all the applications
> out there.

There are a couple of things that can be done (make sure to talk to 
Owen and the Pango folk for their thoughts as well).

 a. Modify the Xft API and introduce Bidi-centric flags.
    This is very unlikely to be accepted as it will have very
    wide ramifications affecting all applications that use Xft.
    If Xft's developers are planning an API change though, you
    might want them to consider piggy-backing this as well on
    top of their changes.

 b. Add your own Bidi and Shaping calls to Xft proper (even via
    external library calls, etc).  This way you give a potential
    Xft user the option to have Xft Bidi and Shape its own strings
    before passing them over to its already known and used functions
    and APIs.  The user will, inevitably, know if a downstream
    application will Bidi/Shape as such he/she would know if they
    need to Bidi/Shape in Xft or not.

I know I didn't say anything new - but adding Bidi/Shaping to Xft
seems like the more logical step to _me_ :-)

Salam.

 - Nadim



	
		
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