Re: NSGlyph is still a puzzle
Re: NSGlyph is still a puzzle
- Subject: Re: NSGlyph is still a puzzle
- From: Douglas Davidson <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 14:46:58 -0800
On Monday, January 21, 2002, at 02:33 PM, Anabelle Masour wrote:
I believe I understand most of it now. But I want to ask this just for
clarification. All the possible written forms in arabic are enumerated
in the NSFont, yes ? It is not the case that some NSGlyphs are
generated dynamically like the characters a (small a) and %(accent
aigu) making 7 (a accent aigu) in French ? There must be a 7 NSGlyph
already in the NSFont ?
A single NSGlyph corresponds to a single glyph in the font. Exactly how
this works in practice depends on the font. If a font contains a single
glyph for a composed form like an accented a, then that glyph will
probably be used. If a font does not contain a single glyph for that
composed form, but instead contains separate glyphs for the a and the
accent, then two NSGlyphs will be generated, one for the a and one for
the accent, and typesetting will position them properly with respect to
each other. You will notice that there are many, many combining
characters in Unicode, so it is impossible that composed glyphs should
be available for all possible combinations, or even all relevant and
useful combinations. This is one of the reasons why conversion between
characters and glyphs is many-to-many.
Douglas Davidson