[scribus] Indic Support

[Gora Mohanty]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:25:34 +0200
Pierre Marchand <capparis at free.fr> wrote:

> Vous (Animesh Das) avez écrit :
[...]
> > Is there any possiblity to do the process more faster?
> 
> As avox said once when I asked the very same question: "Yes, help to release 
> 1.3.5" :)

Fair enough. I will chip in by polishing up the spell-checking
plugin.

> > Is it possible to 
> > use ICU as the rendering engine,as ICU is Indic text supported.
> 
> Scribus will primarily use a third party library. There are 3 possibilities 
> I’m aware of:
> 1/ Harfbuzz - the community choice, not publicly released yet.
> 2/ ICU - supported by a big company, working.
> 3/ M17N - outsider in this area, but I like their DB based system.
> 
> TBH, as I already did it for fontmatrix, I would be tempted to offer choice to 
> the user and support both (at least ICU & Harfbuzz). What’s pretty sure is 
> that OpenType support will be achieved through Harbuzz OT processor module, 
> even if ICU or other is used for shaping.
[...]

I think that Harfbuzz should definitely be the longer-term target. My only
fear is that the longer-term keeps getting longer and longer. ICU is here,
and works now. My impression from talking to avox was that ICU/Pango does
not quite meet the need for the details that Scribus needs. However, if it
is adequate enough for shaping, then we can volunteer to help integrate ICU.
I am not sure what OpenType handling needs Scribus has, nor of the current
state of the Harfbuzz OpenType module. Would libotf from m17n be a possible
interim solution if Harfbuzzz OT is still under development?

Regards,
Gora