how update the website for the complex layout

Dear Werner, Lawrence,

Sorry, please let me change the Subject of the discussion...

I feel a sympathy with the impression "often we receive the questions
looking for the complex text layout features in FreeType itself",
and the impression might make some experts tired.

The expected way would be guiding the people to some sample code using
HarfBuzz or something like that, even if they are out of the FreeType
project.

Also, update of the website document is expected. Taking a glance,
I found a few points.

P1) Currently FAQ does not answer to such questions.

P2) Tutorial II "Managing Glyphs" has some mentions about vertical
text layout, but unclear what FT2 can do and what FT2 cannot do.

Yet I don't have a good answer to a person saying "I don't care
the right-to-left scripts, or the complex glyph shaping like various
Indic scripts, I understand they need very complicated technology.
But I just want the support for CJK vertical writing mode, it should
be possible that raw FT2 supports it? The dependency chain before
HarfBuzz, like X11, pixman, cairo, glib, C++, etc etc are too long
for me!"

One of my headache is that there could be documentations describing
"dumb" vertical text layout (and misleading some people to outdated
solutions), like, the glyph rotation in the renderer-side. I was
thinking such technology was already gone, but recently I heard
some HTML renderers adopted such technologies to work with inappropriate
fonts X-p.

Regards,
mpsuzuki

On 2021/05/16 17:15, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sun, 16 May 2021 08:06:23 +0000 (UTC), Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 16 May 2021 20:00:20 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>
>>> You want me to submit an item for the FAQ along the lines of “How do
>>> I do advanced/language-specific text layout?�
>>
>> Mhmm, this too, but I have thought of something quite at the top level
>> to really, really scare people away from inventing the wheel again,
>> underestimating the many difficulties that come with good typesetting.
> 
> Yeah, but that’s a bit beyond my level of expertise. I’m the kind of
> person who thinks HarfBuzz already does a pretty good job ;).
> 
>>> I can mention Fribidi for bidirectional arrangement, HarfBuzz for
>>> shaping/placement/substitution, and Cairo for actual rendering.
>>> Anything else along those lines anybody wants to see covered?
>>
>> This looks very promising, thanks!  Maybe it makes sense to mention
>> ICU also.
> 
> I’ve never used that, though. The ones I mentioned are the ones I’ve
> used.
>