[Issue 78749] some Latin text needs CTL processing

[stevanwhite at openoffice.org]

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http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=78749





------- Additional comments from stevanwhite at openoffice.org Thu Aug  5 12:33:42 +0000 2010 -------
yaoziyuan, you are right.  This has to do with the OO rendering engine.

It makes OO look very bad.  Since OO is so important to the free software
community, it makes the whole community look bad.

You mentioned the rendering engines used by KDE4 and Gnome.  But also Windows
Vista+ and the Mac OS have good support for these features.

The effect is, any graphical web browser, and much simpler word processors such
as KWord, and even the lowliest text processor on these systems renders mark
placement fairly well (never mind MS Word).  But not OpenOffice.

OpenOffice Writer is primarily about text display of high quality.  Without
that, all the fancy bells and whistles are for the garbage.  Anything else you
can do with it, could be done better with some other tool.

Crucial features that still seem to be absent in OO 
   'ccmp' ligature composition (as opposed to the ccmp decomposition table)
   'mark'
   'mkmk'
certainly there are others.

Scripts that would use these features (and may be illegible without them)
include: Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, but there are many more.

I don't know if OO supports 'abvm' and 'blwm', but these are used a lot with
Indic scripts, as well as Tibetan.

But mark positioning is used for fine placement in general for languages that
use marks.  And that includes the *majority* of European languages.  It makes
the difference between text being very ugly, and looking great.

See for example:
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_table_formats2.html

This issue makes the product look stupid and useless for a large fraction of
potential users in the world, yet since this report was opened in 2007, it has
been marked priority P3 "Of interest, but not planned or expected in this
release" (and many related reports preceded it.)

Colleagues, let's get our priorities straight.

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