RE: RTL PUA?

From: verdyp_at_gmail.com [mailto:verdyp_at_gmail.com] On Behalf Of Philippe Verdy

>> I agree that OpenType font tables cannot to glyph re-ordering. But totally incorrect in saying that it cannot handle ligatures.

> I meant "recognizing and generating ligatures in the context where
> re-ordering has been performed externally by the renderer".

That statement isn't adequate: the results of re-ordering may result in contexts in which ligatures will occur. That can happen, for instance, in displaying Indic scripts.

> Ligatures can only be recognized in OpenType, provided that the layout
> engine has performed the reordering itself, because OpenType fonts
> won't recognize ligatures with glyphs in arbitrary order or intersperced
> with other unrelated characters coming from an unreordered glyph sequence.

I'm not sure what it means to create a ligature of glyphs in arbitrary order. If you mean a rule to substitute [g1 g2] with [g3] won't apply if the sequence processed by the OpenType Layout lookup processor is [g2 g1], then that's true: if the behaviour of the script is such that glyph re-ordering is appropriate, then a rendering engine for OpenType should do that reordering, and substitution lookups in OpenType fonts should be written to assume that that reordering has taken place.

>>> What this means is that, in practice, PUA are only usable in fonts
>>> for characters with strong LTR directionality, excluding all
>>> reordering and mirroring.
>>
>> In the OpenType specification, the only data related to glyph mirroring
>> that a rendering engine is assumed to have is the bidi mirroring data from
>> TUS 5.1. (See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/TTOCHAP1.htm#ltrrtl.)
>> All other glyph mirroring is to be handled using glyph substitution data in
>> OpenType Layout tables in fonts.
>
> Exactly, but mirroring data for remapping glyphs will not be be part of that
> font.

Um... Why not? If the mirroring isn't in reflected in http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.1.0/ucd/BidiMirroring.txt, then it must be handled by glyph substitution in the font as a normal GSUB operation.

Peter
Received on Sun Aug 21 2011 - 13:33:56 CDT