How Would You Like Your Text Today?
Unicode specifies shaping behaviours involving formatting control characters to affect particular typographic options for many writing systems, notably those of South Asia. While such characters are essential to the encoding models for some scripts, and potentially provide powerful support for user text preferences, they are awkward to work with and under-utilised. Using the test case of Sinhala, a script whose encoding model relies on formatting control characters to affect traditional orthographic norms, this presentation demonstrates approaches to supporting these in fonts and a set of scripts to affect the appearance of text using such characters. From this, the concept of ‘text modes’ is introduced as a possible model for implementing governmental standard, community norms, or individual preferences at the document, application, or system level.