Subject: Re: BiDi and script support
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Tue Apr 04 2000 - 06:03:27 CDT
Thank you very much for the comments.
> Does this imply that you wish to support languages which are
> not "installed" in the OS? Or can we assume that only installed
> languages are supported?
> >Scripted alphabets - suggested approach
> >The appearance is handled by a rendering engine built into the
> >view, which will translate the character to the glyph in the font
which is contextually
> >correct.
> Why not let the OS handle this?
Because not all OSs are able to. Yes, I mean to support languages that are not
installed in the OS, and the SIL rendering engine allows me to do that at
least to some extent. Of course, if the language is supported by the OS, that support
should be utilised. However, there are some languages that will never get supported
in any OS, either because the commercial producer does not have the
motivation, or because there is no-one to add the support into OS like Linux
(dead languages, very small ethnic groups). Windows is particularly poor in this respect.
In my w work I use bibical Hebrew, classical Greek and Western Syriac --
there is no version of Windows that offers adequate support for either,
not mentioning the three together. Further, I am often forced to use a proprietary
coding of the languages, because the fonts that are commonly used
(and even required by publishers) do not conform to the iso standards.
Now, I am not proposing to chuck the standards out, but to allow
support for non-standard codings if the user wishes so.
> >(b) each font can be internally associated with direction of writing; b is the
> >better option, making it more transparent to the user and thus easier to use.
>
> Yes, but it's not always accurate since most/all non-Roman
> fonts also have the Roman set in the bottom 128 characters - and it's
> common to use those for small Roman words and numbers.
> also good reasons (related to import/export) to use a formatting
> attribute, even if it's done transparently to the user when switching
> fonts/keyboards/script systems.
There are lot of non-Roman fonts used in the academia that do not
have any Roman chars in them at all, but I take both your points, I
have not thought of either.
Any further suggestions, comments and criticism are welcome. I
have got ereally xcited about the potential when I first came across
AbiWord and am all keen get the bidi and related stuff into it, but it
has to be done properly (which means not necessarily my way).
With regards
Tomas
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