[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 20542] Adding EOT Font Rendering capability

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20542





------- Comment #21 from jshin at chromium.org  2008-10-17 11:20 PDT -------
(In reply to comment #20)
> Indic sites need to move to standard encodings. Lots of fonts with unique
> encodings have had ISCII or Unicode converters created for them by users. (e.g.
> http://www.baraha.com/help/baraha/font_convert.htm or
> http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/nai.html )

Ick. No ISCII, please. Switching to Unicode is a long over-due. No doubt about
it. 

The reality is that they're slo........w in switching. In some Indian languages
(like Malayalam), the switch has been accelerated recently, but in other
languages, it appears that it's moving really slowly.  Sigh....

There are a lot of reasons to switch to Unicode. Even with EOT support in a
browser, copy'n'paste, find-in-a-page, and history would not work.  And,
obviously, the practice is not search-engine-friently, either. 

There is a Firefox extension that makes all the above possible by translating
each textnode in a font-sepcific encoding (depending on the font used) to
Unicode on-the-fly. ( http://padma.mozdev.org/ ) There was  a proposal to add
that feature to Chrome (actually,  Webkit) natively, but I haven't  mentioned
it here because it'd require rather invasive (and potentially perf-impacting)
Webkit changes (as well as a few dozens of font-specific conversion tables) and
I was not sure whether it'd fly here.  That's a certainly alternative to EOT
support with a better user-experience, but with a lot to think about as
mentioned earlier. I wonder what others think of this alternative. 

Just thinking aloud further:
How about enabling EOT supports for pre-configured list of (font, website)
pairs? The vast majority of them will be Indian web sites with a small number
of sites in Burmese,Khmer, etc (however, the speakers of the latter languages 
have been rapidly embracing Unicode so it's perhaps 100% Indian web sites). 


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