Starting on an embedded font engine for the iPhone

I’ve recently started work on an embeddable bitmap font engine for the iPhone, for the specific use of non-mainstream scripts such as the many Indian languages, Arabic, Farsi, etc.

Why write my own engine and not work with Apple’s system libraries?

1. I don’t trust Apple’s QA process for scripts that don’t represent a big market. They brought a Devanagari font (for Hindi) to the iPhone but shipped it with the chhoti-I matra broken; this is one high-impact bug. One possible explanation is that their system font library (FreeType?) doesn’t yet support OpenType features that enable glyph re-ordering etc., which Indic scripts rely on. But why ship the font with the phone if you know you can’t render it correctly yet? I have to assume that they intended to support this (because they owned the font anyway) but that their QA was broken.
   

In general it’s safe to assume that Apple isn’t interested in supporting non-mainstream scripts unless they have to; Arabic has to be a bigger market than Hindi and the iPhone still doesn’t support Arabic despite being available now in Jordan, as of early Feb 2009.



2. Fixes in the firmware henceforth won’t work for users who’re on older firmware. You can’t discount that some people might not upgrade.



3. It should be easier to port the font engine to the other prominent mobile platforms: Android, Symbian, Blackberry, Java ME, Palm, etc.

But why bitmap fonts? Doesn’t everyone use TrueType now?

1. They’re easier to construct than TrueType fonts, especially if you only need them at a small number of point-sizes. I expect redistributable licenses for existing Indic fonts will be hard to obtain and will be missing the more exotic diacritics and ligatures in any case. The fonts that do come with OS X are certainly missing some of these.



2. The rendering and glyph-alignment will be far simpler to code, and smaller, which is all good in a mobile app.

I’ve made a little progress; I’ll report it here as I go along.