[REBOL] Proportional-spaced fonts with accent marks
From: louisaturk:eudoramail at: 5-May-2002 0:03
Hi rebols,
I am working to create an interlinear Greek-English book from a Greek
book. I plan to use 3 scripts to do this. The first script simply puts a
duplicate paragraph under each paragraph in the book. The second script
searches through the resulting file for each Greek word and does 2 things:
(1) in the bottom line, it replaces that Greek word with the appropriate
English word, and (2) adjusts the spacing of the top line (if necessary) so
that the top Greek words stay over the proper English word. The third
script will break the top and bottom lines in the proper places, and (if I
can figure out how to do it) justify the lines while keeping the Greek and
English words properly aligned.
The first script is trivial provided rebol can process fonts with accent
marks. Can it? The third script I will worry about later.
The second script would be rather simple if I could use fixed-space Greek
letters without accent marks, but I at least need the accent marks. This
is why I have been interested in Unicode, but, Rebol doesn't yet support
Unicode, and I am needing to get on with the project. Also, I am beginning
to think unicode isn't the answer anyway. Perhaps I just need to learn a
little more about fonts so that I can use the proportional-spaced Greek
font with accent marks that the Greek book file was created with. This
would make the finished interlinear much more compact and nicer looking.
The problem is how to line up the words when the letters vary in width and
sometimes are an extra byte long because of the accent information.
Can someone tell me how to do this, or point me to a book or article
somewhere that explains it? Is it extremely difficult?
Is rebol suitable for this project? If not, what language would be
best? I can program in C if I have to, but programming in C is so slow for
me, and I haven't used C for a long time. I would really prefer to use
rebol.
Are there any not-so-obvious problems any of you see that I might encounter
while doing this project?
Thanks,
Louis
