[mapserver-dev] UTF8 - direction control characters

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Ian,

I think the upshot of the Hindi issues is that we need to use a 
different text rendering library in mapserver, but that will likely 
require some funding to get it integrated.

Regarding the boxes, it turns out that UTF8/UNICODE have a lot(some?) of 
zero width or non displayable characters. We already have some code in 
mapserver to filter out a few of them that we ran into with arabic. If 
you can figure out which ones these are, then you can probably just add 
a few more to the filter list in the existing code.

-Steve W

On 5/13/2013 5:40 PM, Ian Walberg wrote:
> Stephen,
>
> We are also chasing the Hindi issue and as you say this could well be
> related to fribidi.
>
> Regards
>
> Ian
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
> [mailto:mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Stephen
> Woodbridge
> Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 9:37 AM
> To: mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> Subject: Re: [mapserver-dev] UTF8 - direction control characters
>
> On 5/13/2013 11:43 AM, Ian Walberg wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>> We are trying to display labels with UTF8 direction control characters
>
>> in them and we are seeing boxes in the text.
>>
>> For example inserting a RLE code does seem to change the rendering
>> order as expected but also displays a box.
>>
>> Our guess is that the control character has not been removed when the
>> text is rendered so gets rendered as an unknown character.
>>
>> We are happy to look into this in more detail but could do with some
>> guidance on where to look.
>
> Ian,
>
> Since mapserver does nothing with the text except to pass it to fribidi
> and then it renders the fribidi text using freetype, I suspect you need
> to ask this question on the fribidi list.
>
> There was alos a thead a while back that might shead some light on this
> on this in spite of the fact this this thread was about rendering Hindi
> characters.
>
> http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail//mapserver-users/2013-January/074015.ht
> ml
>
> -Steve W
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