Re: [indic] Re: Lack of Complex script rendering support on Android

From: Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2011 18:53:08 +0530

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 4:16 PM, jitendra <jituviju_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> The issue of complex script not being enabled in various OSes and interfaces
> is linked to font. I mean if unicode had been truly font-independent or at
> least if unicode had been dependent on only truly free fonts (of complex
> script), the problem could be resolved.

It seems you are trying to say that Unicode should have been a glyphic
encoding. I will not continue that discussion here.

> Opentype, Open Font(ISO) as also the Harfbuzz all orginate from the same
> proprietary standard .
> Is that the reason why many systems cannot adopt complex (i.e.Indian)
> sctipts readily?
> What is the way out?

I think you are thinking that the problem is much bigger than it is.
All that is necessary for Android developers to do is add the tiny
Harfbuzz to the display stack. Thereby you can get OT and Graphite (if
you also linkin the Graphite library). With today's smartphone
processors (my new phone has 1 GHz) adding HB to the rendering stack
will not really cause any performance problems.

I think maybe the Android devels are waiting for HB's API to
stabilize. Hoping Behdad (HB author/maintainer) does that soon.

-- 
Shriramana Sharma
Received on Fri Nov 04 2011 - 08:29:05 CDT

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