Special Letters?

Gora Mohanty gora at sarai.net
Tue Jul 22 04:53:38 CEST 2008


On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:21:44 +1000
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:51:09 +0530 Gora Mohanty <gora at sarai.net> babbled:
> 
> > On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:01:24 +1000
> > Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org> wrote:
> > [...]
> > > this is why EFL doesn't have support. i'd have to write it all, OR use
> > > pango... and pango, last i looked, was not light on overhead,
> > 
> > Agreed there. Have not actually benchmarked Pango myself, but by all
> > accounts it is resource-hungry, though that is probably not inappropriate
> > for a library aiming to handle all of Unicode.
> 
> in all reality though - it's probably the ultimate way to go... or something of
> the kind...

Hmm, maybe it is worth thinking about stripping out the portions
of ICU/Pango that apply to scripts from particular regions, and
making region-specific packages of these.

[...]
> oooh - i was just talking about utf8 being how the code all deals with text.
> you have a lot fo glyph space available, so it's not limited. foo COURSE you
> will need to translate to other charsets when dealing with things like SMS,
> email etc. 
[...]
> then you still need a converter tat converts series of chars into special
> utf8-encoded glyphs to represent this font... not pretty... but of course
> possible.
[...]

Yes, you are right about the need for converters, and the need for special
fonts, but I believe that this is the only way to get support for complex
scripts on text-based terminals. This will need to be done at some point
for the Linux console, as I doubt that they are ever going to roll support
for complex text handling into the console drivers.

For now, on the OpenMoko hardware, maybe a stripped-down ICU/Pango is the
best solution. Let me think about this.

Regards,
Gora




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