[Indic-computing-devel] Re: [Indic-computing-users] OTF ?

[Keyur S. <key...@ya...>]

--- Viveka Nathan K <vi...@la...> wrote:

>   How can I use Opentype fonts ?

You can use OpenType font through freetype library.

> If I use it, what is the size of a character in a file ? Is it double as
> normal characters?

It depends on the encoding you choose in the OTF. The whole idea of OTF
font technology is based on character encoding instead of glyph based
encoding. So size of a character stored in the file depends on intermediate
convertor library (if it is there). You can still use Unicode encoded
OpenType font and store ISCII data in your physical file. But then you need
to convert ISCII data into Unicode before passing the data to OpenType
parser.

OTF can support all existing fixed length character encodings (including
ISCII). It can support all future encodings also. But there are tools like
VOLT which put restriction on you to use only Unicode encoding while
designing OpenType font.

> What are the applications, that supports OTF ?

On Linux, FreeType is a library that can parse the tables of OpenType font
which contain complex rendering rules. There are separate higher level text
layout tookits/libraries which support OpenType font through this freetype
library. One such toolkit/library is Pango. You can use it with your
applications. Entire GNOME desktop environment will be based on this
library. In future, other applications like Mozilla will also be using
freetype library.

- Keyur


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com