Graphite (SIL)
Graphite ( also SILGraphite, formerly Open Graphite) is a project to create a Unicode -compatible "smart font " format with associated software system for processing, which is developed by SIL International, headed by Sharon Correll with the assistance of UNESCO.
The format is open and documented its implementation is freely available as free software under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License ( LGPL) and the Common Public License (CPL ).
Graphite was used for the representation of characters of minority languages developed (→ flexibility or "smart " ness ). It can (as well as AAT, unlike OpenType) not yet standardized in Unicode characters, the transitional about the so-called Private Use Area (U E000 to U F8FF ) are coded, rather than as defined as letters (Lo = Letter, other) treat, for example, as diacritics.
Technology
It is based on the TrueType format that is extended by three new tables with rules in the Graphite Description Language ( GDL). In addition to the GDL consists Graphite from a compiler for the GDL, which adds the TrueType files the additional rules. There is also a rasterization engine for such Graphite fonts with corresponding GDL interpreter. The engine can also be used in real-time applications and so for example, represent editable text in a program window and directly respond to substitution, insertion and removal or marking portions of the text and update the display accordingly. For this purpose, it receives next to displayed strings eg the cursor position and provides not only the relative positioning of the characters to each other for the flow of text and line breaks. Thus it can be used as a backend for text processing applications and in that capacity is already in experimental versions of the Mozilla browser ( SILA ) and installed the OpenOffice.org been. It supports bidirectional text (eg Arabic script ), contextual shaping of character and generation of diacritical signs and ligatures from the specified character as components.
Use
It is a simple text editor called Worldpad with support for Graphite available. Frank Tang, the former head of internationalization at Netscape, is working on an expanded graphites Mozilla browser called SILA, are available from the test versions. Since version 3.2 offers Open Office Graphite support also. Before OpenOffice had supported about 110 languages. With the Graphite engine, users can use the software for many hundreds of other languages, which is of particular interest to minority languages that are otherwise hard to find attention. The OpenOffice offshoot LibreOffice includes the Graphite engine since its first version (3.3) and offers a completely rewritten Graphite engine that is designed to provide strong performance improvements and increased stability since version 3.4.
Charis SIL and Doulos SIL are implemented in addition to a number of other fonts in this format.
History
The project began in the mid 90s. 1998 was initially started to write software, which initially went under the name WinRend, which was changed to the present name in 2000 behind closed doors at the ( Windows ). The software system was ( as the initial name suggests ) originally written for Windows. After an initial free release ( version 0.8 ) was contacted the Free Software community through various mailing lists and targeted platform independence for the program library. The work on SILA was recorded and released on 11 October 2002 for the first time results. Graphite Development was moved to SourceForge, where 2002 Version 0.9 was released on November 15. Under the direction of the main responsible for the GNU / Linux support Daniel Glassey Graphite has been ported to Linux and made compatible to font rasterization software Pango. Meanwhile, it has also been ported to Mac OS X.
The current version of the software package is 2.3.1.