Re: [Freetype] Where can I find a decent introduction to text layout?

[David Turner]

Pedriana, Paul wrote:
> I recently finished implementing Thai, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean 
> support for our app (SimCity 4.exe). This support includes drawing 
> multi-line text, drawing HTML text, and editing multi-line non-stylized 
> text. Implementing proper Thai text editing is a bit more complicated 
> than English, as anyone who's done this knows. Computer games (such as 
> SimCity) don't get to use the OS-provided text editing and display 
> functionality (especially if the code is executing on something like a 
> Sony PlayStation or Nintendo GameCube), so we are stuck writing such 
> support ourselves. Directly using third party code (open source or 
> otherwise) to do what we want is often impossible due to 
> legal/licensing issues.
>  
I really don't understand why you wouldn't be able to use ICU.
Its license is very liberal and shouldn't be a problem for you,
and it already supports all the scripts you're interested in it.

There is also Pango, which is LGPL-ed and thus probably unusable
on the PlayStation and GameCube.

> We would like to support Hebrew and Arabic next, but these are 
> bidirectional and so involve additional complications. Before I go 
> anywhere with this, I would like to know if there are any good 
> references (book, Internet, open source) that would help me understand 
> the best way to approach this.
>  
In case you'd really like to start your own thing, you should look at
the Unicode Book, every version of it has some very good description of
the algorithm required to properly layout bi-directionnal text, and this
certainly isn't trivial :-)

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)