Suggestion on enhance typesetting

Hi, everybody

AbiWord's typesetting algorithm for justified blocks works fine for latin languages like english, french & etc. But for other languages like Chinese/Japanese/Korean and Tibetan, it can NOT generate nicely justified right edge, because in these languages, most sentences has no spaces at all in a single line, so the current AbiWord's algorithm lost shrinking & expanding ability. MS Word can deal with that well, though I don't know how Word does that yet.

Since AbiWord is designed as a multi-language apps, it would make AbiWord more attractive if it can typesetting other languages nicely as well. I've studyed the TeXians' way, many TeX packages has been devloped to add glue & line breaking hints between CJK & Tibetan glyphs, such that scripts in those languages can also be typesetted nicely. I suggest introducing a typesetting scheme like that of XeTeX's \XeTeXinterchartoks, by having a config file for each locale, to insert glue like typesetting elements automatically. I think the fp_TextRun should be enhanced to deal with that. Because I don't understand the class hierarchy well yet, can anybody give a suggestion on how to do that gracefully?

Beside that, many languages like Tibetan needs special treatment on the end of one line and the beginning of one line, I've also read that Thai language also needs special processing of line breaking. So I think it would be very helpful to have an interface to overide the line breaking method for each locale, can anybody give a suggestion on how to do that? Is fb_LineBreaker that right place to add this?

If I can get the help needed, I am thinking about add a branch version to add these enhancement and implement the Tibetan version of typesetting.

Regards!
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Sonam
2008-07-19
Received on Sat Jul 19 07:01:03 2008