2011/7/25 Peter Constable <petercon_at_microsoft.com>:
> I will repeat yet again -- please take note: OpenType Layout does not provide any means for describing re-orderings in a font. No such feature is feasible.
In clear texr this means that all those Asian "insular" scripts
(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, 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).
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.
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?
2011/7/26 Ngwe Tun <ngwestar_at_gmail.com>:
> Dear Phillipe,
>
> Burmese was not still support in Windows 7. Hope, we will get burmese
> support in Windows 8. We are getting Burmese/Myanmar support in AAT and
> language support in Lion.
>
> For the opentype, you can try with tricks for Buginese. Reordering will work
> in Uniscribe itself. So. We tried with GSUB features. rlig or liga features
> support substitute features of glyph. Here is the trick;
> C = Consonant, E= Vowel, M=Medial
> 1) CE => ECE => EC
> 2) CME = CEM => ECEM => ECM
One problem with this approach is that there will be no way to disable
the feature, if Windows later performs the reordering itself, because
then the vowel E will have already slided to the left, and this
"ligature" may propagate it further to the left, possibly associating
it to another consonnant.
So such a tweaked font would have to be updated again to remove this
pseudo-ligature if it uses "liga" or "rlig". That's exactly why I
spoke about the definition of a specific OpenType feature, whose
purpose is to be enabled by default on existing OpenType
implementations that don't perform the reordering, but that would be
ignored later by any layout engine that knows that it handle the
reordering itself for that script.
Such reordering must absolutely NOT be performed by both the font
features and the text layout engine. This means that if such
substitution rules are inserted in an OpenType feature, the engine
MUST have a realiable way to detect it. The "liga" or "rlig" features
have not been designed for that purpose (Just consider the already
registered OpenType features: they are extremely specific to precise
reordering situations, such as repha forms, or for scripts where some
diacritics or vowels have various styles for placement before, below
or after the letter)
On MacOS, which does not perform any reordering itself, but depends on
AAT (or OpenType features), there's not risk of stability even for
tweaked fonts. But on Windows and Linux, or in other layout engines
that don't use AAT but perform the reordering themselves and not in
the font, this is definitely a problem.
> For the wikipedia matters;
> you should go to the wikipedia incubator. http://incubator.wikimedia.org
> you will see about "How to start a new test wiki?" Section. we have started
> some minority language of Myanmar in this place.
There's already a Buginese Wikipedia (its default script is Latin, but
the Buginese script is supposed to be supported as well). Wikimedia
projects do not make distinctions based on the script used, only on
the language.
> We will release Myanmar Linux Desktop in 11/11/11.
Myanmar/Burmese also already has its own Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia
and Wiktionnary).
Personnally I think that the rendering issue is even more critical for
Wikitionnary (all linguistic editions) where the need for supporting
"minority" scripts (these are definitely not minority scripts when you
consider the size of these communities speaking the associated
languages (and that now want a renewed interest on their historic
script, not just Latin or Arabic).
The first thing they want is a stable resource for the dictionnary to
stabilize an orthography.
Philippe.
Received on Mon Jul 25 2011 - 20:29:29 CDT
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