4 ms·
Are there characters that really can't be drawn individually? Surely there's something better than a black box for pretty much any character.
by grahamburger 8y ago
Are there characters that really can't be drawn individually? Surely there's something better than a black box for pretty much any character.
- squiggleblaz 8y agoYes, I disagree that it doesn't make sense. You're not supposed to see a ZWJ, so the correct render of it is not visible. So even if you include it in your font - well, the correct thing for your font engine to do is to apply the semantics of it correctly and change the render of the surrounding characters.
- planteen 8y agoYes, but there are glyphs, especially in Indic languages, that have no representation in a presentation form in Unicode. If you are familiar with Arabic, each glyph has forms - isolated, beginning, medial, and final. Your "typical" Arabic string is composed of isolated code points, they go through a text shaper, and out come glyph indices that also have a Unicode code point associated with them. You do the same thing with an Indic language, except imagine that the glyph indices that come out have no corresponding Unicode code points. It's very surprising at first and some software can't handle these unassigned or "hidden" glyphs. So my point is: how much value would there be in requiring a representation of a small fraction of the glyphs (only those with Unicode code points, many of which are ZWJs) in a script in a standards document when potentially hundreds of forms are necessary after shaping to represent the language?