Re: [xep-support] XEP, Uniscribe, and Complex Fonts

Dear Alexei,

Thank you for your in-depth response. The issue is much clearer now, but
not completely so.

If I understand your reply correctly, the problem with the mis-rendering
of Tibetan scripts in the PDFs is not the fault of XEP but of the
"viewer application", say Adobe Acrobat Reader. However, I have created
PDFs with Tibetan script from Word using a PDF printer, and the
resulting PDFs properly display the Unicode Tibetan in Acrobat. Of
course, such a method does not provide the same formatting control that
XSLT/FO and XEP do. Is it perhaps that I am not embedding the font in
the PDFs created through XEP? Or is there something else I am still not
understanding?

BTW, I am using a Windows version of XEP not Linux.

Thanks again for your time with this, and my apologies if I am slow in
understanding the issues.

Yours,

Than Grove

Alexei Gagarinov wrote:
> Hi Than,
>
>
>> However, such a font properly renders in Windows only when there is
>> access to the Uniscribe (ups10.dll) system library. I read in the
>> archive that:
>>
>> XEP is a Java application. It does not use platform-dependent API.
>> Uniscribe is a Win32 API for multilingual writing; XEP has no access
>> to it.
>>
>> But, that was in 2004, and I was wondering if there has been any
>> advancement in XEP's dealing with complex OpenType fonts, some work
>> around its inability to access Uniscribe, such as using the Java
>> OpenType class.
>>
>
> Let me explain:
>
> It is a viewer application that displays (i.e. draws) glyphs.
> And the glyph's drawing may rely on different "drawing" functions.
> Some of these functions are capable of reading/using OpenType Layout
> information, others are not.
>
> Glyph's drawing of complex scripts in Windows uses Uniscribe API.
> The same drawing under Linux uses other API functions.
> There is no way to tell the viewer application what functions it
> should use. All you can do is to replace the according
> system/application library.
>
> XEP is not a viewer application, it is a XSL-FO rendering engine.
> Yes, XEP implements internal font's parser (much more complex than the
> simple java.awt.font.OpenType interface), but all parsed information
> (including OpenType Layout information) cannot be directly used on the
> upper -- "drawing" -- level.
>
>
>> can you suggest any way that we might be able to create PDFs with
>> Tibetan script?
>>
>
> You can create PDF with Tibetian script using XEP on any OS. ;)
>
> There are few open source analogs of Uniscribe for Linux (e.g. ICU
> Library, Pango, FreeType Layout). They essentially provide the same
> services Uniscribe provides in Windows.
> Just install one of them.
>
> Best regards,
> Alexei Gagarinov
> RenderX
> ---
> www.renderx.net
>
>
>
>
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Received on Mon Aug 27 08:42:25 2007