[luatex] tibetan font support

[Norbert Preining]

Hi everyone,

I am confronted with my past when I studied Tibetan, and helped people
setting tibetan, at that time with omega.

Now we have many more freely available fonts and I want to make them
available for (la)tex, based on luatex, aleph, or whatever.

Tibetan is written a bit like Sanskrit, so you have consonant-stacks.
Finally fonts are somehow *decent* that they follow the same layout:

Normal Unicode glyphs are in the *right* positions, so tibetan ka in
0F40, etc.

And consonant stacks that are pre-formed are saved in some private area
but with names conforming to what Adobe recommends. So

ka = 0F40
ya-subscript = 0FB1

so the pre-formed glyph kya is called "uni0F400FB1"
and so on with more (2,3,4) uni chars.

Now my question: Is there any way to handle that *automatically* in
luatex? Or has anyone written a automatic OTP conversion tool that does
this? The idea is:
- basic mappings from latin chars/ascii chars to tibetan letters are
  defined
- if a combination of uni chars are found and the combined letter is
  found (searching longest match first) the string is replaced by
  the respective glyph uniXXXXYYYY etc

Thanks a lot and all the best

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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