complex scripts patch committed

[Glenn Adams <gl...@skynav.com>]

The complex scripts (CS) patch is now committed to trunk at revision
1293736 [1].

[1] http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=1293736

The functionality added by this patch is enabled by default. If you do not
need complex script support or do not need the benefit of OpenType Advanced
Typographic Tables (e.g., advanced kerning, ligatures, etc) in non-complex
scripts, then you can disable these features by one of three mechanisms:

(1) add <complex-scripts>false</complex-scripts> to your fop.xconf file (as
a child of the <fop/> element), or
(2) specify -nocs option as a command line option when invoking FOP, or
(3) invoke setComplexScriptFeaturesEnabled(false) on the FOUserAgent
instance you use programmatically;

If you do not disable complex script features and you use non-complex
scripts, there is a small processing and memory penalty which would not be
incurred otherwise. Furthermore, for large fonts with many OpenType
Advanced Typographic Tables, such as Arial Unicode MS, you may notice a
significant processing penalty at font load time.

At present, the complex script features support only PDF, AT (XML), and IF
output formats. Support for other formats is expected to be added over
time, depending on user needs. In particular, support for PS, PCL, AFP,
RTF, Java2D, and image output formats is not yet implemented.

Other limitations apply to CS features as well, including:

   - only OpenType advanced typographic tables supported
   - only certain complex scripts are supported in this initial patch,
   specifically Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, and preliminary (largely untested)
   support for Gujarati and Gurmukhi
   - only certain OpenType CS fonts have been tested, see [2] for the
   current list;

[2] http://skynav.trac.cvsdude.com/fop/wiki/SupportedFonts

I will be migrating (to the Apache FOP documentation and wiki) and
enhancing the (limited) documentation I originally provided at [3]. So stay
tuned for updates.

[3] http://skynav.trac.cvsdude.com/fop/wiki/ComplexScripts

Finally, to give you advance warning, you will notice when you run this new
FOP the first time that your font cache will be rebuilt. This is because
the serialized font cache data has changed, and thus the old version of the
cache won't load. If you switch back and forth between this new work and
the pre-CS trunk, then the older form of the font cache will be rebuilt.

I have noticed that rebuilding the font cache often takes quite a bit of VM
space, and, as a consequence, you might run out of memory if you run FOP
the first time on a large FO file in combination with rebuilding the font
cache. One way to deal with this is to first run FOP on a small, input file
that has the side effect of rebuilding the font cache. Subsequent
invocations will not have a problem since they won't rebuild the cache a
second time.

Regards,
Glenn

Re: complex scripts patch committed

[Clay Leeds <th...@gmail.com>]

Nice work Glenn!

"My religion is simple. My religion is kindness."
- HH The Dalai Lama of Tibet

On Feb 26, 2012, at 12:09 AM, Glenn Adams <gl...@skynav.com> wrote:

> it looks like this commit didn't break the nightly trunk build, as it just completed without error [1]
> 
> [1] http://ci.apache.org/builders/fop-trunk/
> 
> whew...
> 
> On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Glenn Adams <gl...@skynav.com> wrote:
> The complex scripts (CS) patch is now committed to trunk at revision 1293736 [1].
> 
> [1] http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=1293736
> 

Re: complex scripts patch committed

[Glenn Adams <gl...@skynav.com>]

it looks like this commit didn't break the nightly trunk build, as it just
completed without error [1]

[1] http://ci.apache.org/builders/fop-trunk/

whew...

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Glenn Adams <gl...@skynav.com> wrote:

> The complex scripts (CS) patch is now committed to trunk at revision
> 1293736 [1].
>
> [1] http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=1293736
>