complex rendering (was: Re: Mandombe)

From: <vanisaac_at_boil.afraid.org>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 15:27:37 -0700

From: Szelp, A. Sz. <a.sz.szelp_at_gmail.com>
> On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Stephan Stiller
> <sstiller_at_stanford.edu>wrote:
>
> >
> > This is interesting only if the encodable elements would be different -
> > remember, Unicode is not a font standard.
> >
> > +1; rendering can be so much more complex than encoding. I'd really like
> > to see a successful renderer for Nastaliq, (vertical) Mongolian, or
> > Duployan. (What *are* the hardest writing systems to render?)
> >
> >
> Vertical mongolian does not seem to be harder to render _conceptually_
> than, let's say, simple arabic. It's more the architectural limitations of
> rendering engines that seem to limit its availability, and the intermixing
> with horizontal text. For Nastaliq, Thomas Milo's DecoType is miraculous:
> it's hard, but given the good job they did, obviously not impossible. —
> Well, I don't know about Duployan.
>
> /Sz

I guess this is my invitation to chime in. I'm close to releasing a beta of a
Graphite engine for (Chinook repertoire) Duployan, using a PUA encoding. By the
release of 6.3/7.0, we should have a working implementation of Unicode
Duployan/shorthand rendering for Graphite enabled applications. Like a Nastaliq
implementation, it's convoluted and involved, but not impossible. It will not,
however, be nearly as beautiful as DecoType; I'm not a designer at heart, and a
Duployan implementation as stunning as Milo's Nastaliq will require the skills
of people several orders of magnitude more talented than I.

-Van Anderson
Received on Mon Jun 11 2012 - 17:33:27 CDT

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