[PyQt] PyQt support for Myanmar scripts (Burma)

[Timothy W. Grove]

On 24/02/2016 17:25, Elvis Stansvik wrote:
> 2016-02-24 13:33 GMT+01:00 Timothy W. Grove <tim_grove at sil.org>:
>> I'm developing a PyQt4 application here in England, and I know someone has
>> been trying it out with Myanmar script, with not very pleasing results.
>> Their comment was:
>>
>> Unfortunately it doesn't handle Myanmar script well at all - many frequent
>> characters are not even displaying when keyboarded; others are displayed but
>> not rendered properly. When I paste in Myanmar Unicode text that has been
>> properly keyboarded in Word, all the characters show up, but are not
>> rendered properly...
>>
>> Does anyone have any experience with this script? Any comments about complex
>> script support in PyQt in general? I guess my real question is, would I see
>> better results with Myanmar if I moved from PyQt4 to PyQt5 with its ICU
>> libraries? Thanks for any comments.
> I don't have a direct answer, but I'm pretty sure Qt doesn't use ICU
> for text layout, only for locale stuff. I know it uses Harfbuzz for
> the shaping of glyphs (at least on X11), and it's of course possible
> there's been some improvement to the Harfbuzz copy that they keep. So
> I think the best way is to try it out.
>
> Elvis
Well, a quick experiment with PyQt5 shows that something in there makes 
the script display better. Ignorant question, probably, but is there any 
way to add Harfbuzz support into a PyQt4 application without making the 
full move to PyQt5?

Tim