[TYPO3-dev] IM font problems

[Christian Lerrahn]

Hi Christopher,
> >  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.
> 
> 
> One thing you might also try is GraphicsMagick (there are static
> binaries available for it on sunsite.dk [1] that you could use for
> quick tests). TYPO3 can also work with GM, and since it's an
> independent project, perhaps it will work or you'll have better luck
> with the GM developers.
> 
> [1] http://typo3.sunsite.dk/software/linux/

AFAIK, GM is dead. GM started as a fork which was motivated by the fact
that IM never got a stable CLI API. However, just after GM had been
founded, IM suddenly took the turn towards are relatively stable API
and made GM obsolete almost immediately. I believe that there is no
significant difference in the code base of the two. I have used GM
before but never tried this particular thing with GM. However, I'd be
very surprised if there was a difference.

Cheers,
Christian