On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:33:14 +0200
Lars Knoll <lars@trolltech.com> wrote:

> 
> Doing it at the XServer level seems wrong to me. Some people tried
> this for hebrew/arabic, but the result can be at best halfways
> usable for displaying. You will get lots of problems with
> applications that query font metrics on a per character basis and
> assume these are correct. There is no way at all you could get an
> editor working this way. 
> 
> So IMO the work has to be done on the toolkit level that offers
> displaying and editing widgets. In our case this is Qt, and I am
> very much willing to devote time to implement this, once we get the
> basics in place. This means I would need some way to get access to
> the open type tables from freetype or (best) Xft. Once we have that,
> we are a big step further, as Qt already offers a lot of the
> infrastructure needed.
> 
 Freetype 1.3 had some support for opentype tables, but was removed in
later versions (& current 2.X.X)
They will be having a seperate layout library for opentype. Pango
utilizes the 1.3 support, an indic opentype renderer has been written
based on it ( and code from ICU ). Indix also has similar code, maybe
that can be used.
 btw can we have say just basic support ( ie just the indic unicode
ranges ), no ligatures. Say just by using a unicode font which has
basic devangari glyphs. Is it possible in Qt 3?

(Sorry for prev mail in this thread, sent by mistake )

Regards,
Karunakar