Purpose:

To demonstrate a means of displaying Unicode encoded, complex, non-commercial scripts in Microsoft Windows (and other platforms) using examples of Khmer and the SIL International's Graphite open source software.

Paper description:

Although Unicode has greatly contributed to the standardisation of encoding with all the salient advantages that has on moving data consistently, facilitating sorting, and reducing dependency on proprietary formatting languages; the life of non-commercial, complex scripts like Khmer has been made much harder in terms of display. Within the realm of Unicode's scripts there are hundreds of languages that commercial software providers are not presently supporting. The SIL International is one organisation filling this vacuum. SIL International's Graphite is an example of a rendering engine that permits re-ordering, one-to-many, many-to-one glyph transformations, and positioning. Graphite has recently been put into the public domain with the hope that it will be further developed and ported from Microsoft Windows to Linux and other Unix-like platforms. See http://graphite.sil.org This Khmer font was neither produced by nor associated with SIL International.

Conclusion:

Complex rendering engines and applications that embed them which can be modified by interested parties are needed to bring the benefits of Unicode to all peoples of the world.