Package com.adobe.fontengine.inlineformatting

This package contains classes that implement inline text formatting.

Introduction

The job of a full-fledged layout engine can be roughly described as the interpretation of some input, typically mixing characters and images on which styling constraints are applied, to produce an output which is a set of positioned glyphs and images. To accomplish this job, a layout engine will maintain data structures, and invoke a number of subcomponents to modify and refine those datastructures (e.g. a table formatter, an hyphenation engine).

A subcomponent of particular interest is an inline text formatter: this subcomponent is concerned with text only, and is tasked with the selection of fonts, glyphs in those fonts, and positions for those glyphs. �inline� refers to the fact that this subcomponent has a limited view of layout: the text is set on a single infinite line, without direct consideration of column alignment and such. It is the job of the layout engine to slice the output of the inline text formatter into lines, align columns, etc.

Major components

The inline formatters implemented in this package do not have an explicit knowledge of the data structure of the layout engine they support. Instead, they have a view on those data structure through the AttributedRun interface. This interface captures the idea of a run of characters or glyphs, with attributes which describe the styling constraints. The attributes are key/value pairs.

The typical client of this package will build some object that implements the AttributedRun interface. This run contains characters. In addition, the client sets some well-known attributes on the run. For example, if the target formatter is a CSS formatter, the client sets attributes such as ElementAttributes.CSSFamily to communicate the styling constraints to the formatter. The formatter can also be configured with resources external to the document, such as the set of fonts which can be used. The client then invokes the format method of the formatter, passing it the object implementing AttributedRun. As the formatter does its work, it transforms the AttributedRun, making successive decisions on how to achieve the styling constraints. At the end, the AttributedRun contains selected fonts, selected glyphs, and selected positions for those glyphs.

Each formatter defines the set of styling attributes it interprets. Those attributes are key/value pairs, where the key is an object of type ElementAttribute or InterElementAttribute. The identity of those objects defines the styling attributes; in other words, the object CSS20Attribute (and only this object) is the key that CSS formatters will use to retrieve the CSS properties specified by the client. Similarly, each formatter defines the attributes under which the result of formatting can be accessed by the client.

AFE offers three formatters:

Writing systems and font layout technologies

While each formatter suports a different set of styling attributes, they all support the same set of writing systems and font layout technologies.

The following writing systems are supported:

  • Latin
  • Greek
  • Cyrillic
  • Armenian
  • Georgian
  • Hebrew
  • Arabic
  • Thai
  • Lao
  • Han ideographs and Kana (CCJKV)
  • Korean Hangul, modern syllables only

The following font layout technologies are supported:

  • OpenType layout, using 'cmap', 'GSUB', 'GPOS', 'GDEF' tables
  • TrueType layout, using only the 'cmap' and 'kern' tables
  • Name-keyed layout, using the names of the glyphs, interpreted according the Adobe Glyph Naming Convention
  • CID-keyed layout, using the CIDs of the glyphs, for the Adobe-Japan1, Adobe-CNS1, Adobe-GB1, and Adobe-Korea1 ROS

The precise definitions of the writing systems, font technologies and combinations of them which are supported are described here.