Re: [ft-devel] Getting the kerning pairs in under O(n*n)

[suzuki toshiya]

Hi,

Emile van Bergen wrote:
> Might the suggestion that FreeType could perhaps /parse and expose/ all tables
> without necessarily /handling/ all of them, help in this discussion?

I guess your suggestion is something like a merge of libotf into FreeType2.
I think it's considerable option, when the developers of the various text
layout libraries could form a consensus about the sharable APIs to retrieve
the content of OpenType, AAT, Graphite etc. I'm afraid that such consensus
is not formed yet, at present. Some people may want to parse the small part
of such layout infos and store in a special format to minimize the memory
consumation, and other people may want to duplicate whole table and modify.

More investigation is needed to evaluate this idea - the first step would
be the comparison of the OTF parsers among HarfBuzz (and old Pango), ICU,
and libotf. I'm not saying as if you should do it, just I want to say the
idea is considerable but difficult to start the implementation immediately.

Regards,
mpsuzuki

Emile van Bergen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2012 at 02:38:40PM -0700, Vinnie Falco wrote:
> 
>>> Please don't forget that FreeType's job is to render glyphs, nothing
>>> else.
>> My opinion is that since FreeType opens the font file, it might as
>> well process everything that is in it.
> 
> Might the suggestion that FreeType could perhaps /parse and expose/ all tables
> without necessarily /handling/ all of them, help in this discussion? 
> 
> Analogous to Adam's audio/video example, could it make sense for FreeType to
> implement the audio/video container demuxers (table parsers) and the video
> codecs (glyph rendering), but not the audio codecs (text layout)?
> 
> (Aside, I don't hear anyone mentioning m17nlib for text layout these days, 
> even
> though it aims to handle all aspects of all current unicode scripts. I've also
> found its API for that quite nice and elegant. Weird is that I see it most
> often in the context of multilingual input alone. Does it have pronounced
> disadvantages compared to Harfbuzz or Pango that I'm missing?)
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> 
> Emile.
>