On 2022-02-16 at 08:31, Stella Ashburne wrote: > Hello >> What if someone sends you a document that has one or more words >> written in Thai? In order to be able to display that document >> correctly, the computer will need code that knows how to handle the >> Thai language. Whether that code is in libthai, or in a more >> general library, or embedded directly in whatever program it is >> that's reading the document, it's still there. >> >> Even if you can be sure you'll never have any reason to want to >> read a document that contains Thai, the same thing applies for >> every other language that doesn't just use the same character set, >> etc., as English. Most of them don't have sufficiently unusual >> and/or complex rules that they need a dedicated library to handle >> them, as Thai apparently does, but they do need something to handle >> whatever rules there may be. > > So why not create libraries for Burmese, Laotian and Cambodian > (Khmer) languages? Why don't we have libburmese, liblaotian and > libkhmer and make them essential dependencies for libpango? There are a few possible answers. A: Because the rules for handling those languages are similar enough to those used for other languages that they can be handled by the non-language-specific code already built in to libpango, but the rules for handling Thai are not. B: Because the rules for handling those languages are similar enough to those used for Thai that they can be handled by the code already present in libthai, so there's no need for another library. C: Because the people who wrote the language-specific code to handle those languages decided to write it as part of libpango, rather than as an external library which libpango can depend on. I don't know which of those answers is accurate, and I can't rule out that other answers may be possible as well, but those are the possibilities that come quickly to mind. It may be instructive to note that the listed maintainer of libthai0 is also the person who filed bug 620001, against libpango, about a rendering issue that affects (affected?) both Lao and Thai. This leaves me thinking that option B is probably less likely than the others, but I don't know that for certain. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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