Re: [ft-devel] A question about freetype and harfbuzz

[mpsuzuki]

On Mon, 28 May 2007 13:48:20 +0800
LingNing Zhang <address@hidden> wrote:

>Hi all,
>I have a question about freetype and harfbuzz.
>FreeType1 includes an extension to support OpenType text layout 
>processing. But this support hasn't become part of FreeType2. Why?
>Why does FreeType2 not use the codes of harfbuzz to support OpenType 
>text layout processing?
>Thanks!

# Personally, I'm one of the people who want FT2 to have
# support for text layout feature. I guess I feel sympathy
# with you. But we are minority among FT2 developers :-).

Excuse me, HarfBuzz developers want FT2 to include
built-in OT table parsers? Or, there is non-ICU/
non-HarfBuzz/non-M17NLib/non-Pango/non-Qt library
their developers want FT2 to have OT table parser
and don't want to copy such from existing libraries?

One of the disadvantage might be: if FT2 has OT table parser,
the rasterizer in FT2 won't use it at all (because full
featured text layout would be too big work to include in FT2).
The integrity & relationship between FT2 rasterizer and
OT support would be confusing. For example, "FT2 can parse
BASE table, but FT2 does not reflect its content to
rasterization" is confusing.

Regards,
mpsuzuki