opentype-shaping-documents VS fbpdf

> The tangent in (1) on how they contradict unicode could have been skipped as well

Not only because confusables already exist, but also (as I already said[1] the previous time this was posted) covering all ligatures used in all typographical styles is very much a non-goal of Unicode. The official position is that the font shaping layer[2] sits atop Unicode’s semantic representation and is free to ligate, spindle, or mutilate it for display however it prefers (at least for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic it’s a preference; other scripts can’t be rendered at all without doing it, such as Arabic—barring the legacy presentational forms—or Burmese[3]).

The only reason Unicode even has those ligatures is that some IBM encodings (which were more presentational in nature) encoded them, and IBM employees wrote a large part of the early standard (based on the decades of i18n experience they had at that point) and wanted roundtripping.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639966

[2] https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents

[3] https://r12a.github.io/scripts/mymr/my.html#combiningV

Until 2017, I kept my resume in troff (well, groff, really). After searching a bit, I finally re-did it in LaTex.

So I have to ask why? Going up a level to http://litcave.rudi.ir/, it's for the author's own personal needs, but what needs could possibly motive what we see there? I'm astounded.

+1 for the Dell Mini 9. In fact, I use it daily for most things, as I got one in mint condition for only a few euros. Tiny Core Linux, framebuffer mode, text-only browsing, Ali G. Rudi's framebuffer tools [1]. I also added a matte screen protector, which is fine against eye strain.

I really don't want to go back to neither a traditional GUI experience, nor, somewhat surprisingly, to a bigger screen. This is a bit odd, but it is much easier to stay focused with a small screen. You'll write more one-liner scripts to help your workflow. A machine the size of an A5 writing pad. It's a nice experience.

The keyboard is also surprisingly tolerable. And, due to being fanless, the machine is spookily quiet, which helps even more with the focusing.

There should be a lot of old netbooks lying around. I imagine they were often used only a few times and then forgotten in that bottom drawer, because, maybe you do need to be somewhat a geek to use one of these in a dedicated manner. I couldn't imagine using my Mini 9 with a traditional GUI, or even a mouse. For terminal-only work, though, it is really great.

So I guess all these old, peanuts-prized machines could be interesting to frugal computing / retrocomputing people, which seems to be a growing niche among younger folks.

1: http://litcave.rudi.ir

I use Tiny Core Linux in framebuffer mode every day. Ali G. Rudi's framebuffer tools were a huge inspiration: https://litcave.rudi.ir/

I've also been curious about fbui (in-kernel windowing system). Not sure how well it works with current kernels, though: https://github.com/8l/fbui

Having really modest needs, I even made an effort to use FreeDOS for essential tasks (writing, PDFs, some scripting), but gave up quickly as I cannot live without a good PDF pager. I also had trouble with constant fan noise on DOS (you'll need some hacks to maybe get around this). It is still mind blowing how fast FreeDOS (or e.g. the even more barebones SvarDOS) boots. It took literally about 2 seconds to greet myself with the good old "C:\>".

Also, it is a system that fits inside the head of even an ordinary person. This is really refreshing these days.

Same here, kind of. I'm reading this thread in Linux framebuffer mode and w3m, a text-mode browser. You can see images with this setup, but only by hovering a particular image link and launching an external viewer.

This has been my main computing setup for about half a year now, and it works surprisingly well (I'm neither a coder nor a web dev, though). Majority of the sites I visit are definitely bearable in text-only mode. It's a flexible setup, too, since I can seee the images if I need to.

For more inspiration, see Ali G Rudi's framebuffer tools [1] and a great site on w3m [2].

1: https://litcave.rudi.ir

2: http://w3m.rocks

You may be interested in the work of Ali Gholami Rudi. Scroll down to the "framebuffer" section: https://litcave.rudi.ir

Apart from things like writing his own C compiler and typesetting systems, Rudi implemented several GUI programs that work on Linux without Xorg or Wayland. He claims there on his site he doesn't even use Xorg any more.