Re: [ft] Does FT provide shaping functionality...?

[Antoine Leca]

Anson wrote
Subject: [ft] Does FT provide shaping functionality...?
> ...to support features like

Sorry, I cannot make sense to your sentence. Are you asking if Freetype does
"shaping", e.g. as described for Microsoft Uniscribe (answer is clearly no),
or if supports the features that allows the building of such "shaping
engine" (answer might be yes, sort-of work in progress.)


> 1. two-dimensional glyph advancing (e.g. going up or down as well as left)

Basic informations is published by the Freetype library.

String handling is not, so relative positionning of glyphs among themselves
is out of scope.


> 2. glyph selection depending on more than just the one character
> currently under consideration (e.g. two adjacent characters may
> be represented by a single "ligature" glyph).

As you put it, it is out of scope for Freetype.


> Things that you need for script like Devanagari.

If you "just" want to draw Devanagari, look after GX/AAT, GIST/ISFA, iTrans,
Pango, Yudit, Uniscribe, ICU, Graphite, Qt, etc. They are higher level
libraries than Freetype is, and in fact some of them use Freetype
internally!


Antoine