[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 22339] Support Indian web sites with EOT by on-the-fly transcoding to Unicode

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22339





------- Comment #4 from prunthaban at google.com  2009-01-08 03:37 PDT -------
Thanks for the review comments.
Let me explain why I have chosen this approach. 
There are few dozen Indic fonts and each of them has their own glyf-to-ascii
mapping. Now if we really want to write transformation rules for them from
scratch, I am afraid it cannot be done by one person. It requires good
understanding of how conjuncts are handled in that particular language.
Considering these limitations, we needed an alternate method where we can
develop these codecs with least effort. Padma plug-in ( http://padma.mozdev.org
) seems to be the right choice because
1) It has an active developer community which is constantly improving it.
2) It supports almost all major fonts in all major indic languages.
3) Some of the Padma developers showed interest in helping to port the
Javascript code to C++.

The logic behind the code (present in this patch) were directly taken from
Padma. The main transcoder code base (Syllable and Parser classes) are written
to handle all types of fonts. They transform the ASCII characters into an
intermediate form before transforming them again into Unicode. They find this
approach easy and flexible. There were some re-arranging of characters done to
simplify the look-up process.

If we take the ICU path, then we need to write all the font transformation
rules and we need to have people having knowledge of each language and font (I
presume that is the case - I have not worked with ICU in the past. If I am
wrong, let me know).

Regarding simplifying the look-up process and minimize the number of classes, I
am not sure to what extent we can simplify it because the code depends on
Padma. By taking the Padma-way, it should be easier to maintain and update
(whenever Padma code-base is updated).

Let me know your thoughts.


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