On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 19:05:39 -0000, Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> On the topic of fonts, I was flabbergasted to discover that the Khmer
> alphabet in Unicode needed a very recent version of Uniscribe to work in
> any reasonable fashion.

{Dilettante warning!} :)

As a dilettante student of Unicode, I think Uniscribe does the reordering;
indeed, I'd expect Uniscribe to contain a considerable amount of code for
handling writing-system-specific rendering. While just now, I must not try
to find the pertinent text, it is online at Unicode.org. It's in the early
part of the Unicode 4.0 book text.

As I understand it, the font does not contain instructions for such
matters as reordering, reshaping, and joining; those are the
responsibility of the software that renders the text. I do recall that
Unicode is clear about this matter.

How I wish Linux had something like Uniscribe!

HTH, and a big apology if I mislead!

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
Yudit and SC Unipad: Two nice polylingual text editors