Re: [ft-devel] Arabic and Chinese, etc.

[mpsuzuki]

Hi,

Without any sample sources showing the difficulty,
nobody can give appropriate comment to solve it.

On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:19:04 -0800
<address@hidden> wrote:
>Are there any examples available that demonstrate rendering
>non-English fonts with characters beyond the 0-255 range?
>I am having difficulty rendering Arabic and Cyrrilic fonts.
>I don't know if the problem lies with my project settings,
>the font I am using, or the way I am using FreeType.
>If I had a working example I could figure it out, preferably
>with a Visual Studio C++ project.

Before all, FreeType2 can load a glyph by single Unicode
codepoint or the glyph index for a specified font,
regardless with whether it is for Latin alphabets nor others.
Thus, if the typographic/scriptic feature is almost the
same with Latin (e.g. Greek, Cyrill, Armenian, Georgian,
modern Chinese in horizontal writing mode, etc etc),
using Unicode or appropriate character encoding specified
by the fonts is sufficient to render the string.

Thus, I guess, you difficulty in Cyrill (you wrote Chinese
in Subject, which did you mean?) might be caused by
inappropriate character encoding or inappropriate font.

If the typographic/scriptic feature is more complicated
than Latin (e.g. Chinese in vertical writing mode, Arabic,
Hebrew, and various Indic scripts), FreeType does not help
the typographic/scriptic feature, so you have to search
appropriate Unicode rendering engines, like, ICU, Pango
or libm17n. But if you're working for Microsoft Windows
or Apple Mac OS X, they have builtin Unicode rendering
engines in the operating systems, so I recommend to check
the existing frameworks in your SDK.

Regards,
mpsuzuki