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

[Tom Hughes]

On 31/05/12 15:27, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:

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

Well Arabic is the one language mapnik already manages to handle, but 
the method it uses to do so isn't supported for other languages, and 
can't work for all languages because Unicode doesn't have the necessary 
distinct codepoints in some cases.

>> 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.

I hadn't heard of it until a week or two ago, either. Details for 
anybody that is interested are here:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz

Tom

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