Re: A consistent approach (rendering engine)

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaam Nadim,

> Unicode is unwilling to add new characters, are they
> willing to
> remove old ones ?

It's not that Unicode is unwiling to add new
characters, but they are unwilling to add any proposed
character. You have to make a very good case and
respond to all the counter-arguments that the critics
of the Unicode community will bring to you because
they will be very conservative in terms of what gets
added or changed.

You raise a valid point: How can we bring OpenType
support to the Linux front? I am not familiar with
font support in Linux but I can speak for the Windows
platform. In Windows, the Uniscribe processor,
usp10.dll, which is in the \windows\system32 directory
handles complex script processing. Any application and
font needing complex script shaping in Windows can
make use of it. I can use the most advanced OpenType
font that Microsoft has, Arabic Typesetting (comes
with Office Proofing Tools 2003 and actually renders
some Quran verses correctly too) in a simple program
like Notepad. So it's an add it once and for all
approach. I don't know if this is possible for Linux
environments, but Linux has surpassed Windows in many
things, and why can it not in Arabic support as well.

This is what I have saw after a few searches on google
and found out that Indians have already succeeded in
adding OpenType support to Linux:

http://www.ncst.ernet.in/projects/indix/technical_details.shtml#OpenType
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6282

If the Indians did it, why can't it be done for
Arabic? You might want to contact them to get their
help or do it together. If adequate OpenType support
can be added to Linux.

Kind regards,
Mete


--- Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote:
> --- 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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