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

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello,

Le Thu, 31 May 2012 12:08:16 +0100,
Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> a écrit :

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

I understand the dependency concern. Even though on Linux platforms
Pango is virtually available everywhere, it might be different on
Windows/MacOS platforms.

> 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.

Yeah, that's the point. Mapnik already has an enormous amount of work
to do nice placement and rendering of elements, it would be good if it
could re-use the text rendering logic from an existing library.

Again, especially for the Arabic language, doing the text rendering is
immensely difficult, reinventing the wheel here is not a good idea.

> 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.

I don't know either, I've never heard of HarfBuzz before. 

Regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni                http://thomas.enix.org
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