[Indic-computing-devel] Freetype/OpenType support in XFree86

[Arun S. <ar...@sh...>]

I spent some time today looking at the progress in integrating freetype2
support in XFree86.

http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/fonts/2002-April/001483.html

I downloaded the patches and recompiled XFree86-4.2.0 from source. The
resultant mkfontdir, libXfont.so and XFree86 (the X server) provide the
following functionality:

- I could copy an open type font to a xfree86 dir and run mkfontdir and
  it recognized it and added it to fonts.dir 

- xlsfonts displays open type fonts in the listing

- mozilla can be configured to use fonts such as mangal/raghu/tunga

- The resultant text  has the CMAP functionality, but
  is missing the GSUB functionality. In other words, I see the correct
  glyphs, but glyph substitution ("joining") is not done.

A quick search found this statement:

http://www.freetype.org/pipermail/freetype/2002-June/002387.html

Task #1:

It looks like the indiX code already has the GSUB support - but it's
#ifdef INDIC_SUPPORT. Could we generalize it a bit and feed it to the
freetype developers ? That seems to be the simplest way to get open type
support into XFree86.

Task #2:

Once that happens, the only missing piece will be the shaping engine.
Keyur and other indiX folks, are you working on making them loadable
modules ? Some messages on mail archives seemed to suggest that you are
working on making them loadable modules, so that they could be installed
on top of standard distributions.

	-Arun