> -----Original Message----- > From: Peter Kirk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> I wonder if anyone involved in this is speaking from real experience. > Peter, I don't think your old company actually tried to implement such > reordering No, but my new company has. > I have heard that your new company > has tried it and has claimed that for Hebrew the performance hit is > unacceptable. I am still sceptical of this claim. Well, you're more than welcome to create an implementation that demonstrates otherwise and share it with us :-). > Presumably this was > done by adding a reordering step to an existing rendering engine. But > was this reordering properly optimised in binary code, or was it just > bolted on to an unsuitable architecture using a high level language > designed for the different purpose of glyph level reordering? I don't know the details; I suspect it was done within a finite-state machine. > If, as you agree in principle, this is an issue which goes to the core > of Unicode, should you not be prepared to take some small performance > hit in order to conform properly to the architecture? There's more to life in the real world than conformance to a theoretical principle, and unfortunately most of us live with constraints as a result. > If it is unavoidable to call the same routine (for sorting or any other > purpose) multiple times with the same data, the results can be cached so > that they do not have to be recalculated each time. That's the kind of thing that would be up to a calling application, not the rendering engine. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
