On Friday 21 March 2008 1:52:32 am Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> No. OLPC eventually needs to support all scripts in the world. Even  
> importing all glyphs in Bitstream Vera for regular, bold, italic, bold
> +italic takes a huge amount of memory (the current truetype importer  
> imports only the latin1 glyph outlines). And pre-rendering those  
> glyphs would take even more space.
Current font-based approaches will not scale for the fifteen languages used in 
the language panel of an Indian Rupee (cf. wikipedia), let alone the world 
languages. The problem of rendering multilingual text is analogous to the 
problem of generating optimized machine code given a set of high level 
language instructions. Imagine compiling code with a set of tables containing 
translations for 'typical' instructions and a small set of rewrite rules!

I liked the part in Viewpoints NSF proposal where a glyph can be edited like a 
morph and then have the changes propagated to the whole document. The 
font-based renderer can be replaced with a renderer that generates glyphs on 
the fly from a set of basic shape definitions and transform rules both of 
which are editable. New glyphs can be generated at any time by adding or 
modifying underlying rules or basic shapes.

Subbu