Re: Quranic Proposal - Dynamic glyph substitution with OpenType

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

> Being an OS community I suspect you want them for
> free as well. OK, OpenType
> (http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/main.html) is
> the closest thing to Open
> Source. From MS you can obtain lots of guidance and
> even tools to develop or
> adjust your own
> http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx

Thanks Tom for clarifying that the problem is not with
rendering engines since modern rendering engines
support dynamic fonts such as OpenType fonts.

Mohammed, Nadim, and Abdulhaq, in that case you should
be able to re-design your Quran font as an OpenType
font and implement the behaviour that Tom is
suggesting for tanweens and other cases. As he says,
it seems that OpenType already handles dynamically
substituting a single glyph for a sequence of
codepoints. This way additional characters will not be
necessary except for a new "chairless hamza" and a new
logical character for trigerring variant tanween
glyphs (are there any others?)

You can start here:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx

I would like to help too.

Regards,
Mete

--- Thomas Milo <t dot milo at chello dot nl> wrote:
> > Sorry again Tom for paraphrasing for you. Please
> > confirm whether I represented what you tried to
> say
> > properly.
> 
> Mete,
> 
> You paraphrase is correct with one caveat: the
> rendering engines are not the
> problem. The modern rendering engine is built for
> dynamic fonts (a concept
> pioneered by DecoType). As a result the combination
> of Unicode and dynamic
> fonts is a generic solution, that can be made to
> work in most cases.
> 
> If the industry does not bother to implement
> Unicode, it is usually in the
> Fonts Domain. For unskilled end-users, that is
> frustrating. But I understand
> this group has the competence and the will do
> improve Arabic computing, so
> you need tools to adjust or build the necessary
> dynamic fonts.
> 
> Being an OS community I suspect you want them for
> free as well. OK, OpenType
> (http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/main.html) is
> the closest thing to Open
> Source. From MS you can obtain lots of guidance and
> even tools to develop or
> adjust your own
>
fonts:http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx.
> 
> The least you should expect from the hosting
> operating systems that you are
> putting your cards on is that they support the
> concept of cross-platform
> font technology like OpenType. DecoType is also
> developing ACE into a
> Unicode-based cross-platform function.
> 
> For the end-user it should be irrelevant whether his
> Unicode text is
> rendered by ATSUI, OT, Graphite or ACE. Therefore it
> is of the utmost
> importance that the encoded characters of the
> Unicode standard are of
> universal, plain text relevance and not proposed to
> address an ad hoc
> problem of a particular font on a particular
> platform.
> 
> t
> 
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