[OpenJDK 2D-Dev] Kerning and Ligatures using Layout Engine

[Phil Race]

Phil Race wrote:
> I can take a stab at this but it probably needs the ICU developer to 
> confirm
> what's happening there.

Here's what the opentype layout engine developer over at the ICU project said.

 > I'm surprised to read that ICU handles Myanmar correctly. I suppose that
 > the default processing must work with the fonts he sites. My quick reading
 > of the description of the Myanmar script in the Unicode 5.0 book suggests
 > that it would need more processing. His comment about 'rlig' seems to bear
 > this out.
 >
 > If the presence of marks is inhibiting ligature formation, that could be a
 > bug. I'd need to see some specific test cases to know what's going on. In
 > general, I would expect it to work. (I did recently fix some bugs having to
 > do w/ canonical processing that might  be relevant here...)

So probably taking the up to date ICU layout code into JDK would tell us
if that's one of these recent fixed bugs. Steven is planning to do that
but I'm not sure when it'll happen.
So specific test cases (the text and a reference to the font, and
an "actual" vs "expected" description) would be better. But this
may in part come down to ICU not actually having all the code it needs
to render Myanmar script.

-Phil.