[omega] complex properties

[Antonio Regidor García]

--- gabor.bella at enst-bretagne.fr wrote:
> 
> Pointers only work if the underlying memory structure is shared among all
> steps of the text layout process. This is true if layout is done by a
> single programme such as TeX but not if the texteme string is passed to
> completely separate processes like external OTP's. IMHO, one of the main
> advantage of textemes is that they are (most of the time) stand-alone,
> self-containing entities, as opposed to the separate
> character/glyph/property string model used by other layout systems.

Yes, I agree on this.

> Having said that, I still think that attaching more complex structures to
> properties is something we will definitely need sooner or later. But this
> complexity, as Yannis said, should not interfere with plain regex-based
> OTP's that only act on simple properties.

A standard way to add user-defined properties would be great. I agree that pointers should not be
used, but maybe a language for defining properties would do the work. For example, one can writes:

{c=characterName, p1=v1, p2=v2, ... , radicalTree=vn, g=someGlyph}

and define the type radicalTreeValue as

\radicalTreeValue -> \radicalNode or \radicalLeaf
\radicalNode -> \rn{\orientation, \radicalTreeValue, \radicalTreeValue}
\radicalLeaf -> \rl{\radical}
\radical -> a radical texteme
\orientation -> \horizontal or \vertical or ...

> Lastly let me add that I'm thrilled to be able to discuss questions such as
> these on this mailing list. Besides working on Omega, I'm doing my thesis
> precisely on this subject so your input and ideas are helpful in two ways
> at the same time. :-)

I'm very interested in these subjects, too!! I want to write a dictionary software and learning
tool for Japanese. The first dictionaries will be a mathematics Japanese-Spanish dictionary and a
kanji dictionary so I need to interface Omega (or a modified version of it), and also I became
"trapped" by fonts, encondings, text transformations, and many many other absorbing subjects :)

Regards,

Antonio


	
	
		
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