[webkit-dev] Webkit compatibility in India - Transcoding Indic fonts

[Prunthaban Kanthakumar]

Hi All,

This is a continuation of the mail thread
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2008-October/005495.html

I am interested in discussing about some of the ways to implement mjs'
ideas.

As mjs says in the above mail,

*In case you look into implementing this, what I'd suggest is an extra CSS
property that can be set based the font property at style resolution time.
(since I think the computed font list will strip EOT fonts, so it might be
too late to look at it once you are on the rendering side). Something like
-webkit-indic-text-decode. *

When the code reaches RenderText::styleDidChange method, the font
information will still remain in the RenderStyle object associated with the
RenderText (because this happens at the time of parsing the html file, well
before font resolution happens).  Now in this method, there is check to see
if there are text-transformations as part of the style and if there is one,
then the method setText is called, forcing it to modify the 'internal text'
if needed.

Now we can do the following,
1. Add an additional condition in styleDidChange method to check if the
font-family is supported by our transcoder (At present a fast look-up table
should do because we plan to support only limited set of fonts)  - This
condition will be #ifdefed on ENABLE(TRANSCODER_SUPPORT).
2. Now in the setTextInternal method, based on the font-family, we get the
corresponding transcoder (probably from a map) and perform the transcoding.

Later when font-resolution happens, since the particular font is eot, it
will be ignored and based on the code point of glyphs a default font will be
choosen by Webkit and hence the correct characters will appear on the
screen.
Also after setTextInternal method there is a layout & width recalculation
done which is important for us because we modify the characters. So
RenderText::setTextInternal method seems to be the ideal place to plug-in
the transcoder.

On a related note, I would like to mention here that, we cannot go with the
approach of 'one look-up table' per font-face and a single transcoder to do
the look-up for all fonts. The problem is that many indic languages use
multiple code-points to represent one character and different fonts use
different standards! For example there are situations where one glyph in EOT
needs to be transcoded to 5+ Unicode code points. A reverse situation is
also possible. Due to these issues, we cannot go with a simple look-up table
for all fonts. This forces us to write some specialized code to handle each
font (there might also be some fonts where a one-to-one look-up table will
be enough).

I would like to hear from you about this. Is this approach fine or do you
have any issues or suggestions?

Regards,
Prunthaban
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