International Text

Mapnik supports unicode text through ICU and has only very rudimentary support for Right-to-left (RTL) languages.

This page is to document and discuss improvements needed to unicode text handling.

Current Tickets

#364 / #404 - RTL mirroring
#1154 - Arabic font spacing
#519 - RTL spacing wrong with numbers (UBIDI_MIXED)
#112 - Indic RTL font shaping
#189 / #409 - RTL wrapping (line breaks)
from osm trac: http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/2182 and http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/1515
#550 - line-follow: perhaps made worse by unicode chars, perhaps not, needs closer look
#558 - Character spacing not correct for nepali text
#582 - TextSymbolizer bug with Armenian letters

"State of Text Rendering": http://behdad.org/text/
HarfBuzz
pango library
liblinebreak
- If used Pango would need to be an optional dependency because we don't want to have to depend on whole GLib/GTK stack.
http://shapecatcher.com/
Mozilla bug that has good testcases that could be harvested: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721821