Re: OpenType in Java

From: Eric Mader (mader@jtcsv.com)
Date: Tue Aug 21 2001 - 14:37:10 EDT


At 12:34 AM 8/18/2001, Lateef Sagar wrote:
>Hi,
>I have made an OpenType font for Windoes 2000 and it
>works fine. Now I want to use it in a Java program. I
>can use a font in Java program without even installing
>it (through Font.createFont() function call). Right
>now I am unable to use OpenType features like ligature
>substitution and anchor attachment (through Mark
>Positioning) ect.

The JDK 1.4 beta release contains support for Arabic and Indic OpenType
fonts. The OpenType tables will be applied automatically.

>There is an interface in java.awt.font package called
>OpenType but I don't know if I have to "implement" a
>new class from this interface to fully use the
>features in my font or not.
>And if I have to then I don't know how.

This interface is not implemented. The OpenType support was done using
native code because it would be too slow to access the OT tables directly
in Java.

>My question is: Is there any third party library for
>handling OpenType fonts for Java?
>And if there's not then how can I use Font class and
>java.awt.font packages to do this.

At the moment, you're out of luck if your font isn't for one of the scripts
that the OpenType code knows how to support. (As you probably know,
OpenType requires some "up front" character-level processing before the
tables are applied, and there's currently no way for clients to extend the
processing)

We're looking at making this user extensible, but that won't happen for
Java 1.4. There's also (limited) support for AAT fonts, and we're looking
at supporting other formats so we need to design an extension mechanism
that's format-neutral.

>Thanks
>
>
>
>=====
>Lateef Sagar Shaikh
>Lateef_Sagar@yahoo.com
>ICQ: 21341287

Eric Mader
IBM GCoC, Cupertino, CA



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