Graphite (smart font technology) explained

Graphite
Developer:SIL International
Genre:Software development library
Programming Language:C++
Operating System:Multi-platform
License:LGPL, CPL
Latest Release Version:1.3.14
Latest Release Date:[1]

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.[2]

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 Snow Leopard[3] although with AAT, macOS already provides a technology suitable for minority scripts.

Applications that support Graphite include the SIL WorldPad,[4] XeTeX, OpenOffice.org (since version 3.2, except for the macOS version), LibreOffice (formerly except for the macOS version, since version 5.3, Graphite is available on all platforms).[5] It was built into Thunderbird 11 and Firefox 11,[6] and was turned on by default since version 22, but was disabled in Firefox version 45.0.1 and re-enabled in version 49.0.[7] [8]

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Releases - silnrsi/graphite. 1 April 2020. GitHub.
  2. News: Byfield. Bruce. Graphite: Smart font technology comes to FOSS. Linux.com. March 28, 2006.
  3. Web site: Why was Graphite developed? . SIL International.
  4. Web site: SIL WorldPad . Scripts.sil.org . 2012-08-14.
  5. Web site: 11 November 2016. Release Notes 5.3. 13 December 2016. Wiki. The Document Foundation.
  6. Web site: Graphite - Using Graphite in Mozilla Firefox . SIL International . 24 April 2013.
  7. Web site: Firefox — Notes (45.0.1) — Mozilla . Mozilla . 24 September 2016.
  8. Web site: Firefox — Notes (49.0) — Mozilla . Mozilla . 24 September 2016.