libthai vs. libinthai vs. ICU vs. Uniscribe

Posted December 31st, 2007 by UserXYZ

I need to add Thai line breaking support to some applications that run on platforms other than Linux/Unix and Windows. ICU is too big to run on these platforms and Uniscribe runs only on Windows. So I am looking at libthai and libinthai as possible portable libraries for this purpose. Can somebody tell me what the differences are in Thai word/line breaking support between libthai, libinthai, ICU, and Uniscribe? Can libthai work on platforms other than Linux/Unix? Does libinthai work?

Thank you for any responses.

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Re: libthai vs. libinthai vs. ICU vs. Uniscribe

On January 10th, 2008 thep says:

IIRC, libinthai was the implementation that eventually got into ICU. libthai, on the other hand, is a new implementation written in C, and is currently supporting Thai language engine in Pango.

Yes, libthai can compile and work on Windows with cygwin/mingw. In fact, an NSIS installer source is also available in CVS. It has been tested at some degree, but is not released yet, though.

I don't know much about libinthai in details. So, I can't tell much about the difference with libthai. For libthai, its word breaker uses best-first search to obtain breaking solution with least number of words, called maximal matching, rather than just longest matching, which may or may not yield least words result.