Opentype-shaping-documents Alternatives

opentype-shaping-documents reviews and mentions

• Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 May 2023

  > 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

• Libgrapheme: A simple freestanding C99 library for Unicode
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2022