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Graphite (smart font technology)

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Graphite
Developer(s)SIL International
Repository
Operating systemMulti-platform
TypeSoftware development library
LicenseLGPL, CPL
Websitegraphite.sil.org

Graphite is a programmable Unicode-compliant smart-font technology and rendering system developed by SIL International as free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Common Public License.[1]

Capabilities and comparison to other smart font technologies

Graphite is based on the TrueType font format, and adds three of its own tables. It allows for a variety of rendering rules, including ligatures, glyph substitution, glyph insertion, glyph rearrangement, anchoring diacritics, kerning, and justification. Graphite rules may be sensitive to the context. For instance, there might be a glyph substitution rule that replaces every non-final s by an ſ.

In a Graphite font, all smart rendering information resides within the font file. In order to display the Graphite smart rendering, an application needs only Graphite support, but no built-in knowledge about the writing system’s rendering. This makes Graphite especially suited for minority writing systems that cannot rely on applications to provide built-in rendering information. In this regard, Graphite is similar to AAT and different from OpenType which requires applications to provide built-in rendering information.

Graphite support

Graphite was originally implemented on Windows. It has been ported to Linux. It is also available on Mac OS X 10.6[2] although with AAT, Mac already provides a technology suitable for minority scripts.

Applications that support Graphite include the SIL WorldPad,[3] XeTeX, OpenOffice.org (since version 3.2, except for the Mac version), LibreOffice (except for Mac). It was built into Thunderbird 11 and Firefox 11,[4] and was turned on by default since version 22, but was disabled with version 45.0.1 and re-enabled with version 49.0.[5][6]

Graphite support can be added to applications on Linux with the package pango-graphite[7] and on Windows with the experimental add-on MultiScribe.[8]

See also

References

  1. ^ Byfield, Bruce (March 28, 2006). "Graphite: Smart font technology comes to FOSS". Linux.com.
  2. ^ "Why was Graphite developed?". SIL International.
  3. ^ "SIL WorldPad". Scripts.sil.org. Retrieved 2012-08-14.
  4. ^ "Graphite - Using Graphite in Mozilla Firefox". SIL International. Retrieved 24 April 2013.
  5. ^ "Firefox — Notes (45.0.1) — Mozilla". Mozilla. Retrieved 24 September 2016.
  6. ^ "Firefox — Notes (49.0) — Mozilla". Mozilla. Retrieved 24 September 2016.
  7. ^ Debian Webmaster, webmaster@debian.org. "pango-graphite". Packages.debian.org. Retrieved 2012-08-14.
  8. ^ "MultiScribe". Projects.palaso.org. Retrieved 2012-08-14.


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