While looking for ways to improve / extend font support via Qt, I found this
Stack Overflow post:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24673444/which-opentype-gsub-features-does-qt-4-8-support
(which, its title notwithstanding, also deals with GPOS features, like
"kern", and also covers 5.3).

I have no idea how reliable this info is, but it may show a potential way to
go.

Notes:

1) The set of OT features supported by the custom-compiled' Qt 5.3 lacks the
feature(s) I believe to be most important for our main application field
(musical glyphs), i.e. the stylistic alternates (feature "salt") and the
stylistic sets (features "ss01" - "ss20").

2) It also lacks features which are of great importance for a proper
typographic rendition, like small caps (feature "smcp") and 'old style
numerals' (features "pnum" and "onum").

3) The post also gives a reason for the different behaviour of Qt font
management under OSX.

I see two possible strategies:

A) By-passing Qt font management altogether, directly accessing the
underlying font stack, to free us from the recurring bugs of this Qt area,
from the apparent lack of interest in it from the Qt dev team and from the
special OSX case.

On the spot, I have no clear idea how possible / feasible this would be. It
seems very likely it will be far from simple, both on the side of OT support
itself and on the side of integrating 'our' code with Qt drawing primitives.

B) Improving Qt support by fixing bugs potentially still there and adding
more OT features to the 'experimental' Harbuzz support by Qt. This also
would not be simple, but the coding part could follow established practices
and patterns of the existing Qt code base.

This would however require some commitment and recurring work to keep up
with on-going Qt development, until 'our' improvements are not back-ported
to main Qt, if this is at all likely to happen. Also, it would probably not
address the special treatment of OSX.

In any case, it would be a rather medium-to-long term project. Comments and
suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Maurizio



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