From: Joaquín Cuenca Abela (cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 15:36:04 EDT
On Mon, 2002-06-03 at 16:19, Achim Gerber wrote:
> Hi all,
Hi! Sorry for the late reply
> I am new here.
>
> I am searching for a word processor that is supporting the free range of
> UNICODE. The inner mongolian script is writen vertical from left to right.
> So far I didn't find any SW.
>
> Is Abiword supporting vertical script?
>
> How difficult is it to implement? I am a profesional c++ programmer.
Well, I think that you already you know that, but...: it's difficult!
We don't yet support vertical text. Mongolian is even harder than usual
vertical scripts, because AFAIK mongolian people should be able to mix
mongolian text with other scripts, that have different directions.
And we've just escaping right now from the BMP. In HEAD we're already
targeting UCS-4, but we still don't write type 11 fonts, and we don't do
subsetting, nor incremental downloading of fonts, and I don't remember
if we support CID-keyed fonts, but I don't think so.
Adapting AbiWord to mongolian is going to require expertise in a bunch
of fields (ranging from mongolian itself to postscript, passing through
abiword and pango internals).
For the next big version we're going to use pango, which don't support
mongolian, neither.
If you want an advice, mine would be: start hacking in AbiWord with
simpler problems (there are a bunch on simpler i18n problems to fix),
get comfortable with abiword internals. Help with the pango integration
(right now handled by Tomas), and at the end, add mongolian support to
pango and integrate it in abiword.
None of these steps are trivial. For instance, I think that uniscribe
supports a bit mongolian, but MS Word don't supports it because it was
too hard to change MS Word layout to accommodate such a language.
Before trying to add mongolian support to pango, I will wait until Owen
adds vertical layouts to pango (I think that he'll start working on it
for the next version of pango).
It's not an easy path, but we will be more than eager to help in
everything we can.
Cheers,
-- Joaquín Cuenca Abela cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr
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