Hi Alan
Yes Harfbuzz is moderately low level. It is the equivalent level to uniscribe
on Windows, so it deals with things like converting a series of text characters
into a series of glyphs and probably things like text direction. It is at a
similar level to FreeType, so if we ever wanted the FreeType backend to parse
unicode correctly (something we discussed some time ago) then this would be the
tool to use. Sorry it was a bit off topic, but I thought it might be worth
mentioning.
Phil
________________________________
From: Alan W. Irwin <ir...@beluga.phys.uvic.ca>
To: phil rosenberg <philip_rosenb...@yahoo.com>
Cc: "plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net" <plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Sunday, 6 October 2013, 20:03
Subject: Re: [Plplot-devel] [Plplot-general] overline underline not working
On 2013-10-06 01:31-0700 phil rosenberg wrote:
> Oh and while discussing font layout I found the harfbuzz library
recently. This is apparently the font layout engine used by many linux
applications (including Cairo I think), it also turns out to be pretty
staightforward to build on Windows. The downside is that it has
extremely poor documentation (i.e. none at all). But maybe it might be
useful to us.
Hi Phil:
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz,both Pango (an
important external library for our cairo device driver) and Qt (an
important set of external libraries for our qt device driver) use
HarfBuzz. So my feeling is that HarfBuzz is a library whose API tends
to be used by other libraries and experts, but normal usage is done
indirectly via the API of other libraries such as Pango and Qt.
Since HarfBuzz is an indirect dependency of PLplot, it is included in
the build_projects project, see
cmake/build_projects/harfbuzz/bp.cmake. Just to remind you, the goal
of build_projects is to make it convenient to build PLplot and all its
dependencies such as HarfBuzz on all platforms. So far, there have
been some promising results for Linux and limited results for Wine. In
the next few days I plan to start working on build_projects again, and
once I have taken it as far as I can go on Linux and Wine (this will
probably require at least several more weeks of work), I will be
calling for those here with access to the Microsoft version of Windows
to give it a try. But it is definitely not ready for such testing
yet.
Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________
Linux-powered Science
__________________________
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