Re: [Freetype] unicode improvement....

[David Turner]

Hello CityHinter (wathever your real name is :-)

> the main goal is to reuse old font that is not unicode
> compatible to build what i will call a superfont ie a set
> of font that support a certain type of char.
> 
> if you know such a system let me know if not can this be
> implemented in freetype (as a module or something like this)
> 

The concept of a "super font", also called "virtual font",
"font map", etc.. is rather old. The only way to properly
implement them however is to do it at the text layout level,
not the font engine so we're not going to support it directly
within FreeType itself..

However, it's clear that there must be a way to tell if a
given font supports a given language. This is generally done
by performing a rather extensive study of the font's content
which generally involves the use of _quite_ a number of
external tables.

Something like that is foreseen for the future. It can be
implemented as a FreeType module, but it would probably
result in a massive module that I'd prefer to keep optional
to the library, or to distribute as a separate library on
top of it..

Note that some layout libraries like Pango or UCI already
support the feature, in case you'd be interested by them,
they're very well written and most of their source code is
easy to understand and read..


Regards,

- David