Glyph substitution of Unicode

[vdevan]

The OI OS does not do proper glyph substitution of Unicode fonts. Not sure if this is rendering of Freetype fonts or FB reader. (Cool reader does not even work with Unicode). FBReader for Windows renders fonts correctly, though Windows GUI could be doing this! While the OI supports Unicode and in fact the file names in Unicode format are properly recognised and displayed, without glyph substitution, the rendering of the glyph would be meaningless. This will affect Indic Scripts and Thai scripts, which mainly depends upon glyph substitution. To be fair, until as recently as 2006, glyph substitution never worked in any of the Linux distribution. Only Windows XP with Service Pack 1 (or 2 not sure), have full support for glyph substitution of all Indic Scripts. Current distributions of both Linux and Windows fully support this feature.

For Testing, here is a script in Tamil - my mothertongue: திருப்பாவை

• without glyph substitution this will be something like this

த ி ர ு ப்பா வ ை (Spaces are deliberately left to convey proper rendering). For a complete encoding of Indic font - which supports Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, kannada, Malayalam and Sinhalese, please download, Akshar Unicode from  http://www.kamban.com.au/fonts/akshar.ttf

[dottedmag]

Am I right that the script is left-to-right? Just to ease testing.

P.S: Tamil script is very beautiful, I really like how it looks, even if I can't read it.

[dottedmag]

Moving to 0.3, as major bugfix is required.