[TYPO3-dev] IM font problems

Christian Lerrahn typo3 at penpal4u.net
Fri May 9 11:45:54 CEST 2008


Hi,
this is not really a TYPO3 problem but I suppose that the core
developers should be aware of it. I recently set up a site which will
offer contents in Tamil. As TYPO3 is UTF-8 ready, I believed this to be
no problem. However, it turned out that while TYPO3 itself will handle
everything properly, there is a severe problem with ImageMagick. The
problem is that ImageMagick cannot handle OpenType fonts (and similar
other standards) properly. Tamil has a complex alphabetic-syllabic
structure which requires rules as the ones encoded in an OpenType font.
However, ImageMagick does not make use of any kind of shaping engine
(e.g. pango or ICU on UNIX). This possibly results in the GMENUs (or any
GIFBUILDER object) being wrong in languages with alphabetic-syllabic
structures. While there are certainly workarounds you could use, this
is very annoying.
I have posted the described problem on the IM bugs mailing list but
did not get any replies. I see this as a real issue for TYPO3 sites, so
maybe some core developers could add their weight to my request in the
name of TYPO3.

Cheers,
Christian




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