[texhax] Request Some feed back on TeX

[William F. Adams]

On Feb 4, 2005, at 12:53 AM, Atif Gulzar wrote:

> I have plan to do my MS thesis in Natural Script Processing. Currently 
> I am looking into two fields, Hinting and TeX. Can someone please 
> suggest some potential projects in these fields. I also want to know 
> that what is the future potential of TeX especially for complex 
> scripts.

Well, the major TeX project for complex scripts is Omega. The most 
promising branch of this is Giuseppe Bilotta's Aleph, and I'm sure he'd 
be glad of assistance on this front.

For hinting, well, there's the stuff which is being done in the 
FreeType and possibly Pango projects (Pango is a natural match there on 
the complex script front).

For complex scripts there's Graphite....

but you probably already know all of the above.

I think a really promising thing to research would be to create an 
analogue to Jonathan Kew's XeTeX which isn't tied to Apple's Mac OS X 
platform, say coupling it with Graphite rather than Apple's text 
object.

> I have sufficient knowledge of TrueType and OpenType font development 
> for complex scripts like Urdu and Khmer. I have been part of Nafees 
> Naskh and Nastaliq fonts development team.

There's been some really interesting stuff published in TUGboat 
recently, so you might want to get an overview of what's available by 
looking at http://www.tug.org/tugboat the last two proceedings issues 
in particular are filled with papers relating to the above (modulo 
hinting).

I don't think hinting is going to be particularly necessary in the 
future --- at some point, people are going to figure out that Go Corp. 
had the right idea, make _all_ user interface elements resolution 
independent and scalable, and _finally_ start to take full advantage of 
high-resolution displays which will eventually become ubiquitous.

Anti-aliasing ameliorates the need for hinting by a great deal as well 
--- I don't think there's been much research on optimizing hinting for 
full-colour anti-aliased displays beyond Microsoft's ClearType, so that 
might be an interesting thing to look into.

William

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