[ft-devel] Open Type Font Support on Mobile Devices?

[Waqar Ahmad]

Hi,

Is there anybody who has been working on font related stuff on mobile
devices? I am interested in getting Open Type Font (OTF) support on
symbian, windows mobile devices and most likely on Android in future
as well. As far as I know, Open Type Fonts (Arabic, Urdu etc.) are not
supported on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. FreeType does not
support GSUB and GPOS.

I am thinking about porting an existing open source OTF solution to
mobile devices. A few possibilities that come in my mind are mentioned
below and suggestions from members of this list are solicited.

-Is there any good port of FreeType for Symbian and Windows Mobile
available in open source? If it is there, I can try to further extend
it to add required support for OTF.

-If somebody has experience of working with Pango and consider it good
for porting to mobile devices, this can be another option to explore.

-Google Adroid is using FreeType, however, I don't know if they have
added any support for OTF. One way could be to take FreeType from
Android (assuming it would have been optimized for constrained mobile
devices) and add support for OTF.

I would highly appreciate suggestions and guidelines from this list on
above matters.

Best Regards,
Waqar



However, I am not sure if Open Type Font are completely supported or
not in FreeType library.

Specifically, I am interested in Urdu and Arabic languages support
which require a number of rules for appropriate text rendering like
glyph positioning and substitution. I want to know if such features
are supported in FreeType library? If not, is there any other project
in your knowledge that is working on something similar to what I am
interested in?

I will highly appreciate your guidance in this regard.