Sue and Maurice Bauhahn wrote:
> Unfortunately minority complex scripts > have fallen on hard times between professional > typesetting applications by large corporations > as they increase efficiency. Because these companies > tend to produce cross-platform applications, they > have chosen to largely ignore the intelligent font > handling of the respective platforms. > (ATSUI/OpenType-Uniscribe/OpenType-Pango) > and substitute their own proprietary solutions.
> So even if minority complex scripts are handled by > the OS...these high-end applications do not support > that OS-level handling. Furthermore, there is insufficient > economic incentive to implement proprietary solutions for > complex minority scripts in their applications.
Unicode + complex script shaping in the form of Uniscribe has only been standard on all current versions of MS Windows since the release of XP; on Apple Macintosh unicode + complex script shaping has only been available with OS X; - and on Linux with recent builds of Qt & GTK. On systems using OpenType for complex scripts there are also still quite a number of complex scripts for which support has not yet been implemented. Considering the years it has taken to get this level of support on all these platforms - and the fact it may take several years for the majority of users to upgrade to systems with such support - it's not surprising that not many third party applications have yet appeared which take advantage of the complex script shaping API's on these platforms.
When considering cross-platform applications one problem is that no single "intelligent font" format is supported by built-in shaping engines in all operating environments. Even where OpenType shaping services for complex scripts are provided by operating systems or GUI's there may be little or no support for many of the other OpenType features that developers and users of "desktop-publishing" applications are interested in.
My guess is that Adobe is an example of the kind of company producing cross-platform applications in this area that you are thinking of. They do use their own . OpenType shaping engine "CoolType" which currently seems to lack support for complex shaping of Indic scripts - but does support OpenType features which other engines don't support. Since they have an OpenType shaping engine it would probably not be all that difficult to enhance it to support these scripts, but as you say they may not see an economic incentive to do so.
While it's true that some large software companies might not sell many licensed copies of their applications in countries using minority scripts - their perception might change if say the purchasing departments of all the Universities in Europe and America where languages using these scripts are taught made support for such scripts a *required* feature in software they purchased the companies concerned would listen. It also wouldn't hurt if more users filed formal feature requests with these companies asking them to add this kind of support.
Meanwhile there are some pretty obvious gaps in the market here. Over the next few years I wouldn't be surprised to see some useful "desktop publishing" applications with support for complex script shaping come out of India. After all that country uses more complex scripts than anywhere else, has plenty of highly skilled software engineers capable of developing these applications, and no lack of entrepreneurs.
- Chris
Maurice
