#6515 NORM Never A: Devanagari text support

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#6515: Devanagari text support
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 Reporter:  lukego           |       Owner:  lukego        
     Type:  defect           |      Status:  new           
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
Component:  epaati-activity  |     Version:                
 Keywords:                   |    Verified:  0             
 Blocking:                   |   Blockedby:                
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 Squeak doesn't have proper support for devanagari text. It would be great
 if it did! :-) The basic problem seems to be that the TrueType font
 support does not support some compositing operations that are needed to
 properly render certain devanagari characters. If you install a truetype
 unicode devanagari font and import some text that it will be rendered but
 not correctly.

 One solution would be to hack the TrueType support to handle the necessary
 operations to make Devanagari look right. I don't know how hard this is --
 it may be really hard or it may be quite easy.

 Two solution would be to use a binding to the C library libpango to do the
 rendering for Squeak. Bert and Yoshiki have given us a prototype of this
 binding that does render Devanagari correctly. The downsides are (a)
 portability problems -- it's a headache to install the necessary pango
 support on linux/mac/windows and (b) the prototype doesn't make Devanagari
 work in the standard Squeak morphs (TextMorph, etc) but only a pango-
 specific canvas morph (which I don't think it supports e.g. automatic
 resize or word wrap yet).

 So it would be nice to solve this somehow!

 Meanwhile we're using two workarounds:

 For numerals we install a non-unicode Devanagari font and use it in
 textmorphs. Luckily Squeak renders the devanagari numerals just fine.

 For text we take screenshots of the text that we want and import them into
 Squeak as PNG bitmaps.

 The workarounds are sufficing surprisingly well so far but it would be
 great to have full support!

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6515>
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