From: verdyp_at_gmail.com [mailto:verdyp_at_gmail.com] On Behalf Of Philippe Verdy
> In clear texr this means that all those Asian "insular" scripts
In "insular SE Asian scripts", insular modifies "SE Asian", not scripts. It means the island sub-region of SE Asia, as opposed to mainland SE Asia.
> (except Thai, Lao, Tai Viet, which are encoded in visual order, and a few other
> major Indic scripts like Devanagari, Tamil or other scripts of India, and Khmer
> and Lao that have their reordering support) will never be supported in Windows
> before a long time,
I'm not sure why you say that. In Windows Vista, support was added for Oriya, Sinhala, Lao, Khmer, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Yi scripts. In Windows 7, support was added for New Tai Lue, Tai Le and Phags-pa scripts. (This is just focusing on Asian scripts.) I expect that we'll continue to add support for additional Asian scripts in coming releases.
> unless this support comes later within .Net which will use its
> own layout engine which "may" work without using Uniscribe (like in the current
> versions of IE and Office).
IE and .Net both rely on the same shaping implementation that is used in Uniscribe. There are some of the text stack elements, such as font fallback, that are different, but the shaping for complex scripts is the same.
> But we have alternatives to Uniscribe on Windows. This means that we have to ask
> for support in alternate browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera), that will use their
> own portable text layout engine and not the Windows API.
I don't know of another implementation that supports as many scripts as are supported in Windows, but of course you can use alternatives, and I hope that, together with other implementations, the envelop will continue to be pushed out.
> What are the projects for supporting more scripts in Windows 8 (or "Windows Infinite"
> if I just consider the logo I have seen), if it will be built with an increased integration of
> the browser (HTML5 and CSS 2 or 3) in its interface?
More details about Windows 8 will be made available after the Build conference in September. But as noted above, IE / the HTML layout engine built into Windows uses the same shaping implementation. So, the additional scripts that are supported in Uniscribe will also be supported in IE, and also in DirectWrite and RichEdit.
Peter
Received on Tue Jul 26 2011 - 01:20:25 CDT
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