== Introduction ==

Graphite2 is a reimplementation of the SIL Graphite text processing engine. The
reason for such a project has grown out of the experience gained in integration
the Graphite engine into various applications and frameworks. The original
engine was designed with different use cases in mind and optimised towards
those. These optimisations get in the way of optimising for the actual use case
requirements that the integration projects required. The Graphite2 engine,
therefore, is designed for use where a simple shaping engine is required, much
akin to the simpler OpenType engine interfaces that exist. Graphite2 has the
following features over the original engine:

- Faster
- Smaller memory footprint
- More resiliant to font corruption
- Smaller code base

What is lost is:

- Selection support
- Line end contextuals
- Integrated line breaking to paragraph rendering

.What is Graphite?
Graphite is a 'smart font' technology designed to facilitate the process known
as shaping. This process takes an input Unicode text string and returns a
sequence of positioned glyphids from the font. There are other similar 'smart
font' technologies including AAT and OpenType. While OpenType implementations
are more prevalently integrated into applications than Graphite, Graphite still
has a place. Graphite was developed primarily to address the generic shaping
problem where current OpenType shaping engines do not address the specific needs
of a font developer and the lead time on any changes to address those needs
become prohibitive. This is a particular issue when creating solutions for some
minority languages. In effect OpenType addresses the 80% problem and Graphite
the 20% problem (or is that the 98% problem and the 2% problem?)

There are a number of reasons why someone might want to add Graphite smarts to
their font:

- There is no consistent shaping across OpenType engines for the script and
  writing system that a font designer wants their font to support. Not all
  OpenType engines support all scripts in the same way. In addition, some
  writing system requirements do not fit with the shaping of the script that
  OpenType engines support.

- The font designer would like to implement more complex shaping and positioning
  than OpenType supports. For example, in Graphite one can position glyphs based
  on the positions and sizes of other glyphs.

- Graphite supports user defined features. The font designer may create and
  support any features they want and these can be presented to the user in a
  standardised way.

Graphite allows font implementors to implement their font their way. It does not
require them to fit within an, often poorly specified, interface between the
shaper and the font. This allows for quicker debugging and results. Graphite
supports font debugging to identify what the shaper is doing all the way from
input Unicode to output glyphs and positions, giving font designers better
control over their font processing.


