[sword-devel] Pathway, SIL, GoBible and CrossWire

[Greg Hellings]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 11:23 AM, David Haslam <dfhmch at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Greg wrote, "GoBible overcomes this by using Graphite somehow."
>
> Well, I suppose some phone manufacturers may have designed in Graphite into
> their firmware, but the fact of the matter is that Go Bible relies entirely
> upon what Unicode font coverage has been provided by the mobile phone
> manufacturer. It's pretty rare for any phone to have font coverage for the
> whole of the Basic Multilingual Plane. Manufacturers tend to have firmware
> variants for different marketing regions, to keep their stock levels
> manageable.

It sounded, from Greg's talk, like they have modified the GoBible JAR
file to leverage their Graphite library.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_(SIL). Somehow this allowed them
to use GoBible with minority and unsupported scripts on phones which
did not natively support the full range of Unicode coverage. The
technology and library are very powerful.  It could possibly be used
by AndBible as well, since Android has relatively poor coverage of
some Unicode ranges. I have just pulled out my phone, which is running
a custom FroYo (2.2) ROM and it displayed basic Roman script and
Arabic relatively well but fell flat on its face with extended Roman
and didn't even attempt Burmese. iOS, on the other hand, has very
excellent and extensive support for Unicode since it comes out of the
OS X tradition and its very-well regarded support of non Western
scripts.

Across all the solutions (except for PDF, which embeds its own fonts
in the file) they said they consistently found Android to be very
lacking and weak in support of non-Roman scripts but iOS to be
excellent. This fits with my experience as well.

--Greg