Summer of Code 2012 - First steps

As I follow up to my last post I will give a short overview what has happened this week and what I will do next:

Current status

Itemizing text with respect to format and direction works now, but itemizing on script is still missing. This is not trivial as certain characters don’t have a fixed script value but get it from the surrounding characters. However I found an example in ICUs “extra” directory and will use this as a base for my own code (or use it unmodified if that works).

Code is available on Github.

Next steps

I will add line breaking next. This is actually a rather complex task because you need to perform the following steps:

• Shape the text to get actual glyph widths
• Perform line breaking
• Determine characters from glyphs
• Shape again

Also I will try to build some test cases for my code to verify it is working correctly.

Other problems to solve

• Finding font file from font name in a platform independent way
• Working with fontsets (i.e. selecting a different font if the current font doesn’t have all necessary glyphs)