From: David McCreedy (drmccreedy@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 24 2011 - 10:53:17 CST
I too wrote some font test pages for my old website the Gallery of
Unicode Fonts (http://www.wazu.jp/index.html#test_pages) which is now
administered by someone else.
What's being asked for for Myanmar sounds similar to what I did for
Tamil at http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Test_Tamil.html except that I
didn't provide images for font comparison.
There are no doubt better ways of doing a test page but the layout
might be useful as a starting point.
-David McCreedy
On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 10:02 AM, Ed <ed.trager@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Philippe,
>
> For a long time I have had similar ideas.
>
> In fact, in an experiment I performed back in September of 2009, I
> wrote a utility program to produce a set of test cases for Devanagari
> and also render the test case strings as a set of PNG images which
> could be used to compare the results of rendering in a browser to the
> PNG reference rendering. The utility spit out all the resulting PNGs
> and also an HTML file so that one could quickly review results in a
> browser window:
>
> http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/indic/
>
> For the draft results for Devanagari shown at the above URL, I believe
> I used the GPL'ed Chandas font (http://www.sanskritweb.net/cakram/ ;
> the "glyph ids" shown on the page are obviously specific to the font
> that was used). The Open Source (Linux) Pango layout engine along
> with FreeType was used for the renderings shown in the PNG image
> files.
>
> The purpose of the experiment was to test the Pango layout engine,
> initially against a set of Devanagari OpenType fonts, and to look for
> bugs which might be present in either Pango or in the fonts
> themselves.
>
> My original idea was to eventually expand my test suite to cover *all*
> Indic scripts. And not only that, but also to generate equivalent PNG
> images using Uniscribe and also Apple OSX's rendering pipeline so that
> one could compare all three OS's text layout engines side-by-side.
>
> I quickly realized that such a project would soon consume a lot of my
> time, as I would need to research and understand better the unique
> properties of all of the Indic scripts. I inquired with people I knew
> at one of the major Linux vendors (because one of my primary goals was
> to ferret out the bugs in Pango) but was told that money was not
> available for an outside contractor to perform such work. So I
> stopped.
>
> On a related note, for the Open Font Library project
> (http://openfontlibrary.org/) I had separately written a program
> called Fontaine ( http://unifont.org/fontaine/ ;
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/fontaine/ ) which displays key meta
> information about font files, including but not limited to font name,
> style, weight, glyph count, character count, copyright, license
> information and orthographic coverage. At one time, the JSON output
> from Fontaine was transformed into a very nice report format on the
> Open Font Library site. I had also written a demonstration web
> application where a user could upload a font and the app would produce
> a pretty presentation of Fontaine's report output : for font designers
> and reviewers of works-in-progress, this output is extremely useful
> for showing which glyphs are missing for any given orthography, inter
> alia.
>
> Web font technology via the CSS @font-face rules now enjoys broad
> support among browsers. Using CSS @font-face and well-considered
> Javascript on the front end --along with tools such as those described
> above on a server backend-- would make it now possible to create a
> very comprehensive font testing service as a web application that
> would be quite useful to designers and users alike. However funding
> and support from the Unicode Consortium or from one or more commercial
> members of the Unicode Consortium or other interested vendors might be
> required to make such a service a reality.
>
> - Ed
>
> ==================================
>
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 8:50 PM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>> Then there should exist on the Unicode site, a HTML test page showing
>> correctly encoded Myanmar sample text, with a reference bitmap
>> rendering built with representative glyphs, and a way to change the
>> name of the selected font to see if it matches the specs regarding not
>> only the per character glyphs (those are already in the Unicode
>> charts), but also for the possible alternate glyphs (if they exist),
>> the expected reordering, the combinations in significant clusters, the
>> expected ligatures (when they are mandatory), a non-ligatured
>> rendering (if it's acceptble as a variant).
>>
>> Such test pages should be made for all complex scripts (notably all
>> Indic scripts). This should even be done independantly of OpenType
>> specifications (which are more technical and specific to some font
>> technologies), so that it will not just test the font, but also the
>> renderer and text layout engine, including in a web browser.
>>
>> The PDF given in a prior message also gives some other rendering
>> constraints, notably for candidate line breaks for line wraps : this
>> can also be tested in HTML by rendering the text in a narrow text
>> column (possibly also by allowing the viewing user to rescale the font
>> size, to make sure that all candidate line breaks effectively become
>> true line wraps) : the reference image in the test page should then be
>> shown side-by-side.
>>
>> A very basic Javascript would be needed that just adjust some CSS
>> properties for the tested text (marked up with a simple CSS class that
>> the Javascript will modify in its stylesheet if the user changes the
>> selected font name to test and the font size) would be needed, even if
>> the page content remains mostly static.
>>
>> There are some test pages developed in Wikipedia, but they are still
>> incomplete (and lack the Javascript support for allowing someone to
>> select another font to test easily). But those pages are pointing
>> users to a few compatible fonts, even though the tests are still
>> insufficient due to their limited coverage of the script capabilities
>> and specificities (even on "rare" letters).
>>
>> 2011/3/22 Doug Ewell <doug@ewellic.org>:
>>> I think there is some confusion here. It looks like Ngwe Tun is saying
>>> that the Myanmar text on ayarunicodegroup.org is encoded in violation of
>>> the correct Unicode *ordering conventions* for the script, not that the
>>> encoding is an ASCII hack or something else other than Unicode (which is
>>> what "non-Unicode font" and "migrate to Unicode Standards" usually
>>> imply).
>>>
>>> I copied the text from Ayar's home page into BabelPad, a desktop app
>>> which uses Uniscribe and has no access to any of Ayar's proprietary
>>> fonts (using Code2000 instead), and didn't see any private-use
>>> characters. But since I don't read Myanmar, it's entirely possible that
>>> the text as encoded is complete garbage and needs to be reordered as
>>> Ngwe Tun says.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
>>> RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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