Complex font handling and Crosswalk viewer

Scripture App Builder
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Message from the Scripture App Builder developers:

Each time we upgrade to the next version of Android to build the apps, we come across challenges that need to be resolved.

This time, when upgrading to use Android 10 for SAB 8.0, we have found out that the Crosswalk viewer component no longer works. This is the viewer that some of you use to handle Graphite font rendering for a few of the world’s most complex scripts.

The development of the Crosswalk project ended in 2017, so no one is maintaining the code.

The good news is that there is work in progress to handle the most complex scripts with Harfbuzz under OpenType, which will eliminate the need for Crosswalk. But it could still be some time before users can benefit from this on their devices.

For most of you, this will not be a problem, since you do not use Crosswalk. Go to Fonts > Font Handling to find out if you are not sure if you use it or not.

If you do use Crosswalk, please can you try building your app without it, and please let us know if there is a problem displaying your text well. We want to get a better idea of who is affected by this problem. Thank you.

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Hi, Richard. Jarai (using a Khmer-based script) in northeast Cambodia is one such language. As an example, here’s a screenshot from the app, where a diacritic sort of like a double apostrophe gets layered on a little circle which is a vowel.

image

Here’s the same word from a PDF - when rendered properly, the double apostrophe converts to a stroke underneath the consonant just in case that little circle shows up on top.

[See next post. I’m only allowed one image per post, since I’m new.]

This rendered properly with Crosswalk – so for now we’ll probably downgrade. If you need more details, I’m happy to provide them.

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Here’s the image I couldn’t include in the previous post:

image

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See this update:

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Hi Chris, Is Crosswalk available for SAB 11.2 ? I only see Gecko View.

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GeckoView was the replacement after Crosswalk got too old. It ought to work for fonts which used to use Crosswalk.

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Does GeckoView in SAB 11.2 have the feature to bypass the dictionary-based line breaking feature of the ICU (International Components for Unicode) library so that words are split up correctly (ie. for non-word breaking scripts like : Thai, Lao, Burmese, Khmer) ?

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I don’t know the answer to that, and it will probably require @ChrisHubbard answering.

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@Estr I think the best way of answering this question is to go ahead and try it out and see if you get the result you are looking for. None of the SAB development team has experience with these languages, so we rely on those of you who know them to try out GeckoView and tell us about your experience. Thanks.