On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:35:38 +0200
Lars Knoll <lars@trolltech.com> wrote:

> 
> > 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)
> 
> I know, but as Xft uses freetype2, you would get into trouble trying
> to intermix this with freetype1. The option you have is to copy the
> code from freetype1 over.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Possible. I would need 1-2 quiet weeks to evaluate this.

 This document describes the Indic rendering approach.
 http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/shrinath/indicFeb1999.pdf

> >  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?
> 
> That's already possible. Just set your font family to any indic true
> type font (provided it has a Unicode mapping).
> 
 Thanks, it worked ( before I was trying with a bdf font ). I think
KDE Hindi translations can get going with this. Will put up the font
in couple of days.

Regards,
Karunakar