Re: About combination of thai and devanagrari

Devanagari, not Decanagrari I suppose... Starts by looking at the
TrueType and OpenType specifications:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/SpecificationsOverview.mspx
Then look at the details of the OpenType features needed for
Devanagari and Thai.

You'll immediately see that Thai is much less complex than Devanagari
to implement.

There are other competing technologies, base on TrueType (AAT for
MacOS, Graphite portable across platforms, but not very well supported
in applications).

SVG fonts for now cannot support these scripts very well due to the
impossibility to map precisely the contextual forms that are unified
in Unicode (for Thai, well it could work with modern texts, but for
Devanagari, it's impossible without additional data for mapping the
contextual glyphs): there's still no specification in SVG fonts for
"features" like in OpenType, AAT and Graphite. In addition, the DOM
API for SVG fonts is not accessible in a documented way (only "opaque"
interfaces are available; you have to rely to the XML DOM instead).

There are tricks to support Devanagari with Type1 fonts, but this
requires integratinf additional Postscript routines, specific to the
PostScript engine, to keep context variables in some accessible global
directory, such as the device context, normally not made for that, or
by self modifying the font's directory (such trick is used to generate
some Barcode fonts; font tools generally provide no help to integrate
those routines).

But you may want to create a composite font, in which case a SVG font
can be built that combines two existing OpenType fonts (without
modifying them and without importing or converting their glyph
definitions), grouped under a single family-name and usable on the web
for CSS. Of you can do that with CSS "@font{ ...}", for later use of
the new family in a stylesheet or in HTML.

-- Philippe --

2011/9/6 li bo <libo.imc_at_gmail.com>:
> I'd like to implement the combination of thai and decanagrari scripts using
> vector font. But I have no idea about it. How  do i adjust the position of
> the combined glyph? Could anyone give some advices or references? Thanks a
> lot!
>
Received on Tue Sep 06 2011 - 00:58:43 CDT