From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jun 25 2002 - 23:01:25 EDT
--- Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr>
wrote: > 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.
I found a Windows Mongolian editor a couple of years
ago. I don't think it was a full word processor
though
and I can't remember its name. It used a custom font
and encoding with all the characters rotated 90
degrees.
> > 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!
Nobody seems to have mentioned this RFE for vertical
text in AbiWord:
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3186
A non-contextual vertical layout is used for Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean too. MS Word supports these in
Japanese versions and possibly all versions of Office
XP.
> 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.
Mixing horizontal and vertical is more complicated
than mixing left-to-right and right-to-left languages.
I think it's usual in vertical languages to render
inline foreign text vertically as well with the
characters rotated in the direction of the vertical
text or left as they are. I think CJK leaves them in
their usual orientation whereas Mongolian rotates them
but this could be completely incorrect.
MS Word recommends using "text boxes" if you want to
freely mix text orientations and this sounds like the
best idea. Plain text just isn't going to work.
I don't think AbiWord supports text boxes yet and I
don't think anybody's asked for it. It could probably
also be done with tables some day.
> 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.
Pango is definitely aware of vertical scripts and has
some constants defined for when they get around to
doing them. I think Owen wants them in the next major
version of Pango. And that does specifically include
Mongolian.
> If you want 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.
If you really wanted to get vertical text in, it would
be much easier to start with CJK but keeping the
Mongolian-specific problems in mind. It will also be
much easier to find CJK sample documents. And CJK
vertical text will have a much higher demand, and
thus,
testers.
> 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).
That's true. But it's probably worth adding any
comments to our Bugzilla if you know more about the
problems than we already do.
> It's not an easy path, but we will be more than
> eager to help in
> everything we can.
I would really love to work on this stuff if I had
a machine. I think it would be best in the long run
to also support arbitrary text-direction, including
bostrophedon, in the long run.
Andrew Dunbar.
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Joaquín Cuenca Abela
> cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr
>
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com
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