How is Graphite different from OpenType and other complex script technologies?
OpenType is a widely accepted and powerful smart font technology developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft. The fundamental difference between Graphite and OpenType is that OpenType was not developed as a full writing system implementation system. Rather the assumption is that script-specific knowledge–such as the fact that certain Devanagari vowels are written before the preceding consonant, or that certain Arabic letters have four distinct forms–is incorporated at the application level or in an operating system module such as Uniscribe. For this reason, OpenType does not include the capability to handle some complex behaviors such as Indic reordering. Uniscribe is a module for handling complex-scripts that is built into recent versions of the Windows operating system. It is a layer built on top of OpenType font techology, and contains knowledge of script behaviors of most scripts that are part of the Unicode standard. However, its behavior cannot be extended, as is often needed for
