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

[Tom Hughes]

On 31/05/12 08:20, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:

> For the street index part of MapOSMatic, we are using the Pango library
> to do this kind of work, and it normally handles all the "problems"
> that you can face with RTL languages, and also things like ligatures in
> Arabic. Wouldn't it be possible to leverage Pango rather than
> reinventing the same (rather complicated) logic?

I have suggested using Pango in the past, but Artem was reluctant due to 
all the dependencies it has.

I agree that using something like Pango or HarfBuzz is the only sensible 
way to go though as trying to reimplement shaping for all the languages 
would be a massive job.

I'm not clear how much better HarfBuzz is from a dependency point of 
view - it is still built on top of GLib so looks much the same to me 
from that point of view.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/