Re: Implementing Complex Unicode Scripts

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine.Leca@renault.fr)
Date: Tue Feb 20 2001 - 12:41:09 EST


Charlie Jolly wrote:
>
> Fonts:
> Do fonts have to tie themselves to a script engine.

Yes. Font technologies does not allow things like Nagari or Sinhala rendering
to operate by themselves, they need some assistance from the underlying
platform.
This is the current state of art, one may hope it will change in the future.

> Will an Opentype font for lets say Hindi such as MS Mangal work on an
> Apple OS or Linux?

It may, provided you implement a Indic OpenType compliant process.
It is not as complex as it may sound.

> Or is this font tied to Uniscribe?

No it is not. The font is tied to the (Microsoft's) Indic OpenType
specification <URL:http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OTSPEC/indicot/>,
which is a different beast. Uniscribe is just an implementation of these
specifications, and I hope sincerely Microsoft will not hide some
"features" into USP10.DLL in order to kill any concurrence.
(OTOH, unlike I think Peter I do not believe that any implementation
that is not compliant with the way USP10.DLL behaves, has any future...)

Antoine



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