[Lohit-devel-list] Releasing Lohit Devanagari Today!!

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Lun 8 février 2010 21:59, Bernard Massot a écrit :

> Here are the important facts. I was able to make Lohit Hindi use the
> Hindi La for Hindi language and Marathi La for Marathi for some apps.

The main problem with locl is not that the text stack does not support it
(pango supports it, as does QT IIRC, and for all practical purposes any app
that does not go through them for text is doomed not to work properly with
complex scripts. OO.o people have known for some years they had to migrate and
are doing it at their own pace)

The main problem is that locl-like technologies require apps to know the
language of the text they are rendering. And all too often they do not provide
any mean for the user to set it. That needs to change but is a purely
app-level problem (or desktop-level, if you consider that the keyboard layout
switcher should be replaced by a language switcher like has been the case on
windows for a decade or more). When you create a different font for each
regional variant (or cram different fonts in a TTC file) you hide the language
selection problem by making the font selector a kind of language selector.
That sucks and is massively user-unfriendly but complex script users are so
happy to have *something* they do not grumble at app authors much (they
should).

But anyway, creating fonts is difficult enough without workarounding
application bugs. Please focus on creating good OpenType fonts and let
application authors take care of their own mess.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot