Op Ma, 2010-02-01 om 21:13 +0100 skryf Bernard Massot:
> > OpenType (used in most modern font types) allow a font to
have
> > different versions (shapes) of a same character, as well as to
have
> > different kind of ligatures, matching given languages
> I will appreciate if you could help me understand this. But to do
> this, first, somebody has to Modify the given font. Am I right?
Yes, you're right. I lack time to work on that but I made some tests
and
read some doc. I modified Lohit Hindi font to tell it to do the
"Marathi
L" when Marathi language is required.
I managed to understand how to do with Fontforge. I verified the
result
with the pango-view testing program. However it seems there are not
much
program actually this Opentype feature.
The languages settings in OpenOffice are only used to "determine the
dictionary used for spellcheck, thesaurus and hyphenation, the decimal
and thousands delimiter used and the default currency format". I think
it has to be patched. I'll have to look at what ICU can do.
I wasn't lucky with Firefox either. The "lang" HTML attribute isn't
used
to choose the language in the font. The only way I got it using the
Marathi L was to run Firefox in a mr_IN locale context. It used the
Marathi whatever the web page language, but at least it means it can
use
this feature some way. It just needs to be improved (patched).
Most software that I have seen so far in the GNOME desktop can do the
right thing if they are running in the correct locale. (gedit, etc.)
I am a developer for Virtaal - an application for software translation,
and Virtaal tries to give the correct hints to the platform to help in
the selection of opentype language variants. You can give it a try by
opening a Marathi file, and selecting the correct language in the bottom
right corner. (If you switch between Hindi and Marathi, you might be
able to clearly see the difference.) It might also be necessary to
specifically configure your language-aware font in the preferences.
In my experience the GTK+ library can still improve a small bit to make
this work really well in the case where you might not be running in the
intended locale, but I have verified the use of language-dependent
glyphs for some other languages.
I'd like to hear people's feedback on Virtaal. As I mentioned in an
earlier mail, Virtaal 0.5 also automatically integrates with the FUEL
terms to provide terminology help:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal/autoterm
Keep well
Friedel
--
Translate with Virtaal!
http://virtaal.org/