RE: [ft-devel] Open Type Font Support on Mobile Devices?

[Graham Asher]

I am responsible for the original port of FreeType to Symbian OS, and I
believe that Symbian OS is now open source. I have also ported FreeType to
Windows Mobile for my map renderer, CartoType, and have experienced no
difficulties with it.

However, it's misleading to talk too much about 'porting'. Very few changes
are needed to FreeType (possibly none for recent versions), and it can run
practically unchanged on any modern mobile OS with standard C or C++ and a
rudimentary run-time library.

I haven't worked with specific OpenType features, so I'm as interested as
anyone else in OTF support.

Graham Asher


-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On
Behalf Of Behdad Esfahbod
Sent: 09 April 2009 10:32
To: Waqar Ahmad
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [ft-devel] Open Type Font Support on Mobile Devices?

Hi,

For OpenType complex shaping you need HarfBuzz [1].  Google engineers are 
working on using it for the Chromium port on Linux [2].  Using Pango with
the 
FreeType backend is a simpler solution (Pango+FreeType uses HarfBuzz
internally).

If your primary use is to get Arabic rendering done, you can get away with 
using FriBidi2 [3] only.

behdad

[1] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz
[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/harfbuzz/2009-March/000312.html
[3] http://fribidi.freedesktop.org/


On 04/09/2009 05:19 AM, Waqar Ahmad wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is there anybody who has been working on font related stuff on mobile
> devices? I am interested in getting Open Type Font (OTF) support on
> symbian, windows mobile devices and most likely on Android in future
> as well. As far as I know, Open Type Fonts (Arabic, Urdu etc.) are not
> supported on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. FreeType does not
> support GSUB and GPOS.
>
> I am thinking about porting an existing open source OTF solution to
> mobile devices. A few possibilities that come in my mind are mentioned
> below and suggestions from members of this list are solicited.
>
> -Is there any good port of FreeType for Symbian and Windows Mobile
> available in open source? If it is there, I can try to further extend
> it to add required support for OTF.
>
> -If somebody has experience of working with Pango and consider it good
> for porting to mobile devices, this can be another option to explore.
>
> -Google Adroid is using FreeType, however, I don't know if they have
> added any support for OTF. One way could be to take FreeType from
> Android (assuming it would have been optimized for constrained mobile
> devices) and add support for OTF.
>
> I would highly appreciate suggestions and guidelines from this list on
> above matters.
>
> Best Regards,
> Waqar
>
>
>
> However, I am not sure if Open Type Font are completely supported or
> not in FreeType library.
>
> Specifically, I am interested in Urdu and Arabic languages support
> which require a number of rules for appropriate text rendering like
> glyph positioning and substitution. I want to know if such features
> are supported in FreeType library? If not, is there any other project
> in your knowledge that is working on something similar to what I am
> interested in?
>
> I will highly appreciate your guidance in this regard.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Freetype-devel mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
>


_______________________________________________
Freetype-devel mailing list
address@hidden
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel