What are letest and gendata?

letest is a program you can use to verify that you have built and installed the ICU LayoutEngine correctly. The test is not comprehensive, it just verifies that the results of laying out some Devanagari, Arabic and Thai text are as expected. Once this test has passed, you can use the ICU LayoutEngine in your application knowing that it has been correctly installed and that the basic functionality is in place.

gendata is a program that is used by the ICU team to build the source file testdata.cpp, which contains the expected results of running letest. Unless you have changed your copy of the LayoutEngine and want to validate the changes on other platforms, there's no reason for you to run this program.

(The ICU team first runs a Windows application which uses the ICU LayoutEngine to display the text that letest uses. Once it has been verified that the text is displayed correctly, gendata is run to produce testdata.cpp, and then letest is run on Windows to verify that letest still works with the new data.)

How do I build letest?

First, you need to build ICU, including the LayoutEngine.

On Windows, the layout project should be listed as a dependency of all, so layout will build when you build all. If it doesn't for some reason, just select the layout project in the project toolbar and build it.

On UNIX systems, you need to add the "--enable-layout=yes" option when you invoke the runConfigureICU script. When you've done that, layout should build when you do "make all install"

To build letest on Windows, just open the letest project in <icu>\source\test\letest and build it. On UNIX systems, connect to <top-build-dir>/test/letest and do "make all"

How do I run letest?

Before you can run letest, you'll need to get the fonts it uses. For legal reasons, we can't include them with ICU, but you can download them from the web. To do this, you'll need access to a computer running Windows. Here's how to get the fonts:

Download a recent version of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) from java.sun.com. From this page, follow the link for the version you want to download, and then select the "Downloads" link on the left side of the page. Select either the SDK or the JRE. (The JRE is sufficient for letest.) Read the license agreement and click on "Accept" if you agree. This will take you to the actual download page. Download the package and install it. You'll need one font. On Windows, it will be in, for example, "C:\j2sdk1.4.2_06/jre/lib/fonts. The file you want is "LucidaSansRegular.ttf". Copy this file into the directory from which you'll run letest.

Next is the Hindi font. Go to the NCST site and download raghu.ttf. Be sure to look at the README file before you download the font. You can download raghu.ttf into the directory from which you'll run letest.

Then download the Thai font. Go to into-asia.com and click on the link for the Angsana font. This will download a .ZIP file. Extract the font file, angsd___.ttf, into the directory from which you will run letest.

There's still one more font to get, the Code2000 Unicode font. Go to James Kass' Unicode Support In Your Browser page and click on the link that says "Click Here to download Code2000 shareware demo Unicode font." This will download a .ZIP file which contains CODE2000.TTF and CODE2000.HTM. Expand this .ZIP file and put the CODE2000.TTF file in the directory from which you'll run letest.

Note: The Code2000 font is shareware. If you want to use it for longer than a trial period, you should send a shareware fee to James. Directions for how to do this are in CODE2000.HTM.

That's it! Now all you have to do is run letest (CTRL+F5 in Visual C++, or "./letest" in UNIX) If everything's OK you should see something like this:

Test 0, font = raghu.ttf... passed.
Test 1, font = CODE2000.TTF... passed.
Test 2, font = LucidaSansRegular.ttf... passed.
Test 3, font = angsd___.ttf... passed.