A consistent approach (rendering engine)

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com> wrote:
> It does not matter to Unicode what font technology is
> used behind the scenes. Be it OpenType, ATSUI,
> Graphite, or bitmap fonts, Unicode does not care.
> Unicode defines how the encoding should be done and
> how the result should look like, but doesn't impose on
> what font technology should be used in the process. So
> before OpenType dies, another better font technology
> would probably appear that does all this much better
> than OpenType does.

I'm not debating if we should do this or not (I'm beginning to
believe we have to - no other likely option exists and we don't
have enough clout at unicode to really plead our case based on
logic), but what is sad to note is that going this route will
undoubtedly mean that older font technologies will simply not be
usable and will have to depend on their underlying application
(say the Console) to do all this rendering.  This reliance, as
we have seen from experience, is problematic at best and I can
foresee a great deal of such applications simply not worrying
about a small "exceptions" subset to render a religious document
which I'd guess most would rather not deal with anyway.  My
concern, as noted earlier, is to bring forth a generic
widely-adopted solution soon and I fear that with the various
fragmented bits-n-pieces out there and added complexity, we're
just shooting ourselves in the foot.

Unicode is unwilling to add new characters, are they willing to
remove old ones ?  I'm thinking here of consistency more so than
a solution to our current dilemma.  It seems like what is there
now in unicode is different from what the proposal is likely to
ask for and thus the dichotomy.  It would be ideal to unify all
these issues and not to make more and more exceptions out of them.
Arabic is already a very demanding language (bidi, shaping, composing
characters, ligatures, etc, etc) it would simply be nice to dump
all these issues into a single basket and deal with them as one
entity.  I'm sure those that want to add arabic support might think
arabic is supported 10's of time before it really is (again, we've seen
this plenty of times - take debian's "d-i" as a contemporary example).
You start with "add bidi", then "add shaping", then "add ligatures",
then "add harakat/tanween handling", now "add another subset of harakat" -
I think you see my point.  I've heard plenty of "man, if I knew it was
going to be this complicated I wouldn't have started on this" regarding
adding Arabic support to various applications.

In short, any thoughts on how to unify all that is out there in terms
of these characters (assuming unicode will simply not even entertain
the inclusion of new characters which is what I've recently learned)
to have a consistent result instead of a hodge-podge of fixes ?

Salam.

 - Nadim



		
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