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Graphite is an amazing smart font technology developed by SIL
Copy/pasting from wikipedia:

Graphite is based on the TrueType font format, and adds three of its own tables. It allows for all kinds of smart 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 Å¿.
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, but different from OpenType which requires applications to provide built-in rendering information.

I'm using it on OOo Writer and must say it is awesome: REAL sub/superscripts, REAL small caps, ligatures... everything just appending a proper "tag" to the font name.
And I'm using a western language (mainly Spanish and Italian): for other languages Graphite is almost a must.
To understand how it works, just try this font on Writer, enable "tex mode" by adding :214=1 to the font name:

Code: Select all

Magyar Linux Libertine G:214=1

and type something like SO_4^2^-
As far as I understand it (which is little), graphite support on OOo comes through pango-graphite library, which is gtk based It will be great to have this also on qt apps, specially Kword.

Two quick examples of what Graphite offers.
Ligatures and old style numerals:



how TeX mode on Magyar Linux Libertine works:

I'm sorry, I don't understand what Graphite offer other than TeX mode.

Angel Blue01 wrote:I'm sorry, I don't understand what Graphite offer other than TeX mode.

That's depends on the font. In fact, the only font that offers TeX mode is Magyar Linux Libertine. That font also offers real small caps, old style numerals, real sub and superscripts, umlaut alternatives... Other fonts offers different features. For example, SIL graphite fonts offers several variants of special characters used on non European languages...
Consider that for several languages, ligatures are not about aesthetics: they are a must.
The main advantage of graphite (and its main difference with opentype) is that everything is inside the font file: the program that use the font do not need to know a particular "feature", it only need to understand graphite and the feature will be available for that font. In that sense, Graphite is similar to AAT for mac.

This derived on a Qt feature request:
http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-13750
You can vote for it