Forum Bugs

Shaping in Complex Scripts

cambell
The ordering (shaping) of characters in khmer doesn't seem to be correct. Do you support complex rendering in PrinceXML? If so, what shaping engine to you use? usp10.dll, pango / graphite, icu or something else?

Thanks.

Cambell
cambell
mikeday
In Prince 7.0 we've added support for Arabic and Indic scripts (Hindi/Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, etc.) We have not yet added the shaping rules for Khmer, although we can certainly add it to the development roadmap. We use our own OpenType shaping code.
cambell
Do you use graphite at all? I've got graphite fonts for khmer.

What about other scripts in SE Asia? e.g. Myanmar and related minority languages which are similar but not the same. Also we're interested in northern thai Lanna.

Thanks for the info.

C
mikeday
We don't support graphite fonts at this time, just OpenType.

Thai mostly works, as it does not seem to require any special character ordering, although it does require custom line-breaking which we don't do automatically yet. Other South East Asian scripts requiring reordering have not been implemented yet.

If there are particular scripts you are interested in, expressing that interest may help to move them up the roadmap. :)
cambell
Hi Mike,

Burmese, Khmer, Thai, and Lanna would be the main ones we are interested in.

FYI, I'm a software developer on the WeSay project. Are you using anything related to HarfBuzz? (Or pango / freetype etc)

Are you using graphite in an upcoming release?
mikeday
We don't use HarfBuzz or Pango, we have implemented our own OpenType layout engine. Have you tried Thai with Prince? It should work, as far as I know.
cambell
Hi Mike,

Yes, Thai works as far as I know. We use it for dictionarys and it's seems fine with that.
mikeday
It's been a long time coming, but the latest build of Prince supports the Khmer script! :D