[OSM-dev] [mapnik] GSoC - Improving support for non-latin languages in mapnik

[Dane Springmeyer]

On May 31, 2012, at 4:08 AM, Tom Hughes wrote:

> I'm not clear how much better HarfBuzz is from a dependency point of view

I think harfbuzz-ng (the recent re-write) is much better. It appears to only have one hard dependency: ragel (http://www.complang.org/ragel/). All others are optional (like freetype, ICU, cairo) but of course many of these optional ones are already Mapnik dependencies.

> - it is still built on top of GLib so looks much the same to me from that point of view.

Harfbuzz-ng appears to only use glib for atomics/mutexs on linux, and instead uses osx and windows specific stuff for threading.

I did not find this in the docs but rather digging around the source (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/harfbuzz/) and seeing just a few #ifdef HAVE_GLIB checks.

Herm's complaint I think against Harfbuzz was that it is lacking docs. But it is used by FireFox 4, so I presume we can learn about how to use it from the firefox codebase. It is also proposed to be used in QT: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-18980.

Even if its functionality is lacking compared to pango, it seems like more promising route.
 
Dane