[proposal] fonts comps group

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le lundi 27 août 2007 à 18:47 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :
> BTW after talking with Behdad and upstream on irc we'll probably try to
> switch dejavu-lgc & dejavu at the start of the F9 cycle.

BTW #2

Supporting unicode blocks like arabic by default is only possible today
because the tools have learnt to select different variants of the same
glyph depending on the language being rendered (ie farsi users will get
farsi-friendly variants, and arabic users arabic-friendly variants at
the same codepoints). In particular Behdad Esfahbod recently added
"locl" opentype support to Pango. Kuddos to Behdad!

However this is not the end of the story. Strictly speaking arabic (and
many other non-european scripts) also need support of the "base"
opentype feature to be rendered properly (base allows specifying
different metrics for different unicode blocks within a single font, and
not constrain everything with the metrics of the latin block)

Supporting  those scripts without base will mean a metric migration once
base support is included in the tools at last. ie the fonts will have to
be partly re-done, and every office document using them will have layout
changes if they use one of the complex scripts (and business users will
complain). This will also affect documents that use proprietary
pan-unicode fonts such as those produced by the Microsoft Typography
group.

Therefore I'd like to point out to the PTB it might be a good idea to
allocate some time @rh for Behdad to add base support to pango sooner
rather than later, and avoid this painful migration altogether.

(Of course this assumes the PTB read fedora-devel)

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Ceci est une partie de message num?riquement sign?e
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20070827/c1316bba/attachment.sig>