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

[Michael Twomey]

Hi,

Possibly a slightly off topic reply but here I go:

There is a lot of work in complex text layout (glyph coverage in fonts, glyph 
selection, layout of text, bidi, glyph rasterization and so on) so I strongly 
recommend using a 3rd party library to do this if you can. Freetype for 
example covers rasterization well but you need other components to achieve a 
complete pipeline (am I right?).

One place to look is pango (http://www.pango.org/ is out of date, 
http://www.gtk.org/ has more up to date API docs) which does complex text 
layout in projects such as GTK+. It usually uses xft 
(http://www.fontconfig.org/) which in turn uses freetype. Obviously there 
might be license issues if you used these projects but they might give you an 
insight into what to do. Another place to look is ICU, 
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/, which includes a layout engine, 
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/layoutEngine.html, which I think 
has a more liberal license.

hope this helps,

  mick

On Thursday 21 November 2002 22:31, 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Paul