Special Letters?

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:23:44 +0530 Gora Mohanty <gora at sarai.net> babbled:

> On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:31:48 +1000
> Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:48:43 +0530 Gora Mohanty <gora at sarai.net> babbled:
> [...]
> > > This sounds great. What is the level of OpenType support? Are complex text
> > > layout (CTL) languages like Indian languages, and Thai supported? Is this
> > > true of just the FreeRunner, or also of the Neo 1973?
> > 
> > i cant speak for gtk and qt - for EFL, it uses freetype and fontconfig
> > (optional). it treats text as a string going from left to right with chars
> > that advance to the right.
> [...]
> 
> Ah, in that case it probably will not work for CTL languages, as they
> need various operations like glyph reordering, substitution, etc.
> On normal computers, GTK uses Pango to handle such scripts, but my
> guess is that Pango will be too heavy for the current hardware.
> 
> I will have to try all this out once I get my (currently broken) Moko
> reflashed.

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, so as a matter of
performance doing it the simple way its done now handles things for most people
(who buy/use devices or linux systems as most people tend to speak a
left-to-right friendly language). i have seen remarkably little interest in
things like left-to-right languages over the years, and as there isn't a lot of
demand and i don't actually speak any of these (i just speak european languages
- a few of them, and east-asian languages), i just have never had it come up
high enough on the list of things to do.. to ever do it. at least all the text
internals are utf8 so... it's possible to do this without breakages...


-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>