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Re: [Freetype] Where can I find a decent introduction to text layout?


From: David Turner
Subject: Re: [Freetype] Where can I find a decent introduction to text layout?
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 14:26:36 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910

Pedriana, Paul wrote:
I recently finished implementing Thai, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean support for our app (SimCity 4.exe). This support includes drawing multi-line text, drawing HTML text, and editing multi-line non-stylized text. Implementing proper Thai text editing is a bit more complicated than English, as anyone who's done this knows. Computer games (such as SimCity) don't get to use the OS-provided text editing and display functionality (especially if the code is executing on something like a Sony PlayStation or Nintendo GameCube), so we are stuck writing such support ourselves. Directly using third party code (open source or otherwise) to do what we want is often impossible due to legal/licensing issues.
I really don't understand why you wouldn't be able to use ICU.
Its license is very liberal and shouldn't be a problem for you,
and it already supports all the scripts you're interested in it.

There is also Pango, which is LGPL-ed and thus probably unusable
on the PlayStation and GameCube.

We would like to support Hebrew and Arabic next, but these are bidirectional and so involve additional complications. Before I go anywhere with this, I would like to know if there are any good references (book, Internet, open source) that would help me understand the best way to approach this.
In case you'd really like to start your own thing, you should look at
the Unicode Book, every version of it has some very good description of
the algorithm required to properly layout bi-directionnal text, and this
certainly isn't trivial :-)

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)




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