Graphite is a programmable Unicode-compliant smart font technology and rendering system developed by SIL International as free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Common Public License.[2]
| Developer(s) | SIL International |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.3.14 / 1 April 2020[1] |
| Repository | |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Multi-platform |
| Type | Software development library |
| License | LGPL, CPL |
| Website | graphite |
Capabilities and comparison to other smart font technologies
Graphite is based on the TrueType font format, and adds three of its own tables. It allows for a variety of rendering rules, including ligatures, glyph substitution, glyph insertion, glyph rearrangement, anchoring diacritics, kerning, and justification. Graphite rules may be sensitive to the context. For instance, there might be a glyph substitution rule that replaces every non-final s by an ſ.
In a Graphite font, all smart rendering information resides within the font file. In order to display the Graphite smart rendering, an application needs only Graphite support, but no built-in knowledge about the writing system’s rendering. This makes Graphite especially suited for minority writing systems that cannot rely on applications to provide built-in rendering information. In this regard, Graphite is similar to AAT and different from OpenType which requires applications to provide built-in rendering information.
Graphite support
Graphite was originally implemented on Windows. It has been ported to Linux. It is also available on Mac OS X Snow Leopard[3] although with AAT, macOS already provides a technology suitable for minority scripts.
Applications that support Graphite include the SIL WorldPad,[4] XeTeX, OpenOffice.org (since version 3.2, except for the macOS version), LibreOffice (formerly except for the macOS version, since version 5.3, Graphite is available on all platforms).[5] It was built into Thunderbird 11 and Firefox 11,[6] and was turned on by default since version 22, but was disabled in Firefox version 45.0.1 and re-enabled in version 49.0.[7][8]
Graphite support can be added to applications on Linux with the package pango-graphite[9] and on Windows with the experimental add-on MultiScribe.[10]
See also
References
External links
- Official website
- List of Graphite-enabled fonts Archived 2008-05-16 at the Wayback Machine
- SIL Language Technology products, which include Graphite and fonts
- SIL Graphite Sourceforge website
- Project SILA Archived 2012-10-20 at the Wayback Machine — Graphite and Mozilla integration project
- Presentation of Graphite for aKademy 2007, by S Correll
- SIL Graphite Font Demo for testing browsers