BiDi support

[Huw D M Davies]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 05:51:47PM +0200, Shachar wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am new to the mailing list. I am interested in helping out with
> BiDirectional (Hebrew and Arabic) support. Is anyone currently working
> on it? Are there any leads? I am quite willing to get a from scratch go
> at it, but I don't want to fork the effort.

Hi Shachar,

Assuming you're using client side rendered fonts then most of the font
support for Hebrew/Arabic/whatever should be in the tree, so that you
should be able to render any glyph with a Unicode point that exists in
the font (I'd like to konw of any problems you find in this
direction).

For simple bidi support you probably need to implement
GetCharacterPlacement.  (ExtTextOut has had some basic R->L support
added to it only from Windows 2000).  There's a Unicode standard bidi
ordering algorithm explained in the Unicode book, probably we can
borrow the code for this from a library like pango or freebidi.

For more advanced text layout M$ has its Unscribe library see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/uniscrib_35k5.asp

I'm very interested in getting non-roman languages working, so if you
need any help please let me know.

Huw.