[Bug 455981] Missing locl romanian magic

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Summary: Missing locl romanian magic


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455981





------- Additional Comments From gaburici at cs.umd.edu  2008-07-19 17:27 EST -------
It should be done because locl is an *optional* font feature. The application is
free to request it or not. Unfortunately pango always turns locl on based on
laguage. It should be configurable at pango's level, preferably in way that
allows application to modify it via pango markup. It's okay for the default
pango settings to turn locl on for Romania because the Romanian Academy
typographic standard requires commas not cedillas for Romanian text. The only
possible trouble spot is a Turkish name. But that name could be marked-up as
being in the Turkish language in the document [well, not in plain text].

BTW, if you ever saw a Romanian document rendered with mixed cedillas and commas
you wouldn't doubt the necessity of locl. Adobe introduced ROM/locl because they
(and 99% of commercial fonts) remap "t with cedilla" to "t with comma"
regardless of locale, based on the assumption that "t with cedilla" is not used
in any language [There's a post on Adobe forums, but I'm too tired to find it
now]. Mixed diacritics look like €rap for Romanian text in the pre-Unicode 3.0
encoding, which sadly is still far more widespread at least on the web [check
with Google]. A [mild] picture of mixed diacritics is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_alphabet#Adobe.2FLinotype.2FVista_de-facto_standard.
This visual inconsistency is why Adobe Pro fonts can also map "s with cedilla"
to "s with comma" when ROM/locl is turned on. FYI: Vista fonts and the Linotype
fonts [you can check on their site] behave the same way.

Now assume DejaVu, which currently doesn't honor ROM/locl, is used in a document
together with a font that does honor the ROM/locl substituion, not necessarily a
comercial one, e.g. one of the free SIL fonts[*]. You'd get mixed diacritics
again. Granted this is not in the same font, but it is still in the same
document and it looks bad...

Footnote [*] SIL fonts use ROM/ccmp to do the mapping, but pango turns that on
too. I'm not aware of any other fonts except those from SIL that work this way.
Please don't make dejavu work that way. I'd rather have you adopt the Adobe
standard which is used in hundreds of fonts.


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