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

[Hermann Kraus]

Hello!

This is my progress report for the last week:
As it was decided that Pango should not be used for rendering text in  
mapnik because it has to many dependencies I tried to find a new solution  
using HarfBuzz and ICU.

HarfBuzz was hard to understand because there is no documentation. However  
I was able to write a small sample program that processes input text and  
outputs glyphs and their positions:
https://github.com/herm/harfbuzz-test

My next steps are:
- Trying to understand how RTL handling works in HarfBuzz
- Implement a larger test program which works with ICU to break text into  
parts which are either RTL or LTR text
- Add freetype rendering to test actual output

Hermann