Graphite (smart font technology)

Graphite is based on the TrueType font format, and adds three of its own tables. It allows for a variety of rendering rules, including ligatures, glyph substitution, glyph insertion, glyph rearrangement, anchoring diacritics, kerning, and justification. Graphite rules may be sensitive to the context. For instance, there might be a glyph substitution rule that replaces every non-final s by an ſ.

In a Graphite font, all smart rendering information resides within the font file. In order to display the Graphite smart rendering, an application needs only Graphite support, but no built-in knowledge about the writing system’s rendering. This makes Graphite especially suited for minority writing systems that cannot rely on applications to provide built-in rendering information. In this regard, Graphite is similar to AAT and different from OpenType which requires applications to provide built-in rendering information.

Graphite was originally implemented on Windows. It has been ported to Linux. It is also available on Mac OS X Snow Leopard{{cite web |url=http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=projects&item_id=graphite_aboutWhy |title=Why was Graphite developed? |publisher=SIL International}} although with AAT, macOS already provides a technology suitable for minority scripts.

Applications that support Graphite include the SIL WorldPad,{{cite web|url=http://scripts.sil.org/WorldPadDownload |title=SIL WorldPad |publisher=Scripts.sil.org |access-date=2012-08-14}} XeTeX, OpenOffice.org (since version 3.2, except for the macOS version), LibreOffice (formerly except for the macOS version, since version 5.3, Graphite is available on all platforms).{{cite web|date=11 November 2016|title=Release Notes 5.3|url=http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3|access-date=13 December 2016|work=Wiki|publisher=The Document Foundation}} It was built into Thunderbird 11 and Firefox 11,{{cite web |url=http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=projects&item_id=graphite_firefox |title=Graphite - Using Graphite in Mozilla Firefox |publisher=SIL International |access-date=24 April 2013}} and was turned on by default since version 22, but was disabled in Firefox version 45.0.1 and re-enabled in version 49.0.{{cite web |url=https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/45.0.1/releasenotes/ |title=Firefox — Notes (45.0.1) — Mozilla |publisher=Mozilla |access-date=24 September 2016}}{{cite web |url=https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/49.0/releasenotes/ |title=Firefox — Notes (49.0) — Mozilla |publisher=Mozilla |access-date=24 September 2016}}

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• OpenType
• Apple Advanced Typography
• Uniscribe
• HarfBuzz
• International Components for Unicode

{{Reflist}}

• {{Official}}
• [http://scripts.sil.org/GraphiteFonts List of Graphite-enabled fonts] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080516100432/http://scripts.sil.org/GraphiteFonts |date=2008-05-16 }}
• [https://software.sil.org/products/ SIL Language Technology products], which include Graphite and fonts
• [http://silgraphite.sf.net SIL Graphite Sourceforge website]
• [http://sila.mozdev.org/ Project SILA] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121020041740/http://sila.mozdev.org/ |date=2012-10-20 }} — Graphite and Mozilla integration project
• [http://www.unifont.org/TextLayout2007/presentations/SharonCorrellSILGraphiteNotes.pdf Presentation of Graphite for aKademy 2007, by S Correll]
• [https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=projects&item_id=graphite_fontdemo SIL Graphite Font Demo] for testing browsers

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Category:Font formats

Category:Free typesetting software

Category:Text rendering libraries

Category:Free software programmed in C++

Category:Software using the GNU Lesser General Public License

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