Unicode display engine.

[RM]

No joy "over here" on Linux.

Arial Unicode MS.

My "problem" (well, apart from all the other ones . . . ) is HOW to get 
my Devawriter Pro
to "do" 'standard' (lots of quotation marks floating around, sorry) 
Hindi halant entry rather
than the non-standard method (which works cross-platform, but doesn't 
port well to fonts other than my own),
and this depends on the Zero Width Joiner being enabled to strut its 
funky stuff regardless of where it is.

Personally, as the Indians (see below) go their own sweet way, I have no 
particular problem going my sweet
way (in case you haven't worked that one out already), but, rather like 
passing exams, degree certificates
and all those things which I don't like much (but have by the bucket 
load), I realise that the world would be even more
disordered than it is without standards.

AND there are voices pushing for me to sort this halant thingy out. AND, 
if one wants to be crude, I'm banging my head
up against ADOBE; and like David I really would rather like to come 
galumphing back with Goliath's head.

Digging around on the internet I find that the Indians, apart from 
having a time-zone that differs from their neighbours
by 30 minutes instead of an hour, also "type different" as they really 
cannot be bothered that much about interoperability
(even though the Indian government has signed the Unicode 
something-or-other) and carry on rather like Bulgarians did in 1996;
the difference being that Bulgarians being creatures of fashion, they 
jumped on the Unicode train as soon as it showed up.
The Indians keep using their non-standard font systems; a sort of 
reflection of Hinduism - extremely tolerant, and extremely chaotic;
probably rather jolly in religious terms, but not in the world of computers.

Richmond.

On 21.05.2016 11:21, Fraser Gordon wrote:
> On 21/05/16 09:05, RM wrote:
>> I don't know how the Unicode display engine in Livecode 7.0 and 
>> upwards works.
>
> LiveCode doesn't include a Unicode display engine - it takes the steam 
> of characters, breaks it down into words and then asks the operating 
> system's display engine to render those words. This means that the 
> ability to shape complex scripts like Devanagari depends on operating 
> system support.
>
>>
>> But it certainly doesn't seem to want to do some interesting knitting 
>> in Hindi:
>>
>> http://unicode.org/faq/indic.html
>>
>> Section: "Q: I cannot find the "half forms" of Devanagari letters (or 
>> any other Indic script) in the Unicode code charts."
>>
>> Is this "just me", or is the Livecode unicode engine unable to 
>> perform this sort of trick?
>
> I've not tested with Devanagari, but the font shaping supplied by the 
> operating system does work for Arabic letters (the ZWJ and ZWNJ 
> codepoints cause the shaping to use initial/medial/final forms 
> correctly) so maybe the machine you're running on doesn't do Indic 
> shaping? Try entering the same characters into a text editor 
> application to see if it works (make sure you're using the same font 
> in both the editor and LiveCode). If not, let me know as there is 
> something strange going on!
>
> Fraser
>
>
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