[scribus] tone marks - third round

[scribus.mantis.mail_in at a-bc.net]

A big thank you to all who have responded with their input.

Special thanks to John Jason Jordan and Peter Nermander who have
explained very clearly the Unicode features concerning combining
diacritics (and indirectly shown that I am not a nerd who is trying to
do bad or not-meant-to-happen-stuff).

(One user has raised the question of how one could sort (items) if
combining diacritics are used: Depending on your context, you just use
the sort-order that Unicode provides. Or if you are dealing with
specialized programs for exotic languages, you often have
configuration-options where you can program you own sort-orders,
depending on your needs (count-in our dis-regard the diacritics etc).)

But even the specialists will need to come out of their labs, and print
the output eventually. That is where we are hoping for Scribus.



I pricked my ears about this:

Harfbuzz or
another
OTF rendering library into Scribus


Yes, yes, yes! Full font rendering is what we would need. If I
understand correctly, Harfbuzz is either a (supplementary) library
(which I need to convince Scribus to use) or even a port (meaning a
ready-made package? or even distribution? that I could obtain?).

Our organization has got some IT specialists. And you people are the
specialists on Scribus. Please let me know what I would need to use
Harfbuzz with Scribus (or tell me, if it really is not ready for
production-use). Once I know what I need, I will try to figure out
installation (compiling?) and configuration.



Apart from this hope for Harfbuzz, I feel there could be hope with this:
John wrote:

----
I don't know how InDesign does it, but I imagine one could write a
script to accomplish the same thing in Scribus. All you'd need is a
table for all possible character combinations and then do a "search and
if found, kern," and run the script on the entire text. This would not
solve Martin's problem, as he is looking for a way to type them
correctly on the fly. I don't even know if I understood his problem
completely.
----

No worries, we do have a reasonable work-flow. All our typing is done in
text editors and we do spell-checking with some specialized programs. So
we are bringing clean-and-ready copy into Scribus.
	(For the record: LibreOffice does have a rendering engine by default
which does all the stacking and aligning of all the diacritics
automatically and correctly, even with several stacked on top or under
one letter.)
	John figured my problem exactly: With the default rendering, Scribus
does not align the diacritics properly (especially if stacking two unto
one carrier-letter).
	So I am very interested in your idea about a script (I even mentioned
my hope for a macro, in my first mail): How would I go about that, and
where can I read-up on the syntax and procedures? Could I do it as a
macro and "click it together"? Or would I need to learn about an API and
write it (or have it written) in something like Perl?
	Maybe I could have some pointers to documentation please and one or two
sample-scripts which actually manipulate something within a text in a
Scribus-text-frame. Ideally something about kerning but something else
involving search / select / manipulate would help me get into it.


Thank you very much so far.

Note: I am getting more into this list now. I switched yesterday from
the daily digests to the regular mails, hoping it will help me to see
the threats and reply properly and keep the subject lines etc.
	My spam protection told me that two mails got eaten yesterday and I
have now white-listed scribus.net. If someone has written yesterday
again about my request, please do not be offended.
	With my line of work and funny internet, I will often be offline for
several days. So even if I cannot respond right-away, I am very much
interested and I do appreciate all your input. (And I am learning lots
from all the other threads.)


Good weekend,

Martin