Re: [ft] i18n fonts

[gww]

Quoting Russell Shaw <address@hidden>:

> If multiple fonts exist for a language, then for all these font
> files to work with an editor, then all these glyphs must be indexed
> the same.
Ah. You are thinking of the simple old fonts we used to have where there was no
meta-data associated with the glyphs.

But OpenType fonts contain a ton of extra information. If you look at U+0628
(Arabic Beh) in an opentype font you'll see there is information associated with
it on how to change it into initial, medial and final forms. There are a slew of
ligatures for it, etc.

You probably don't want to deal with this yourself. People have already written
libraries (Pango for the OpenSource world) where you pass in a stream of unicode
characters and get out a stream of glyphs and positionings.

If you are on a mac, things are a bit different. Apple has designed their own
data structures for their fonts. Much of the same information is present but it
is stored differently.