From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Aug 23 2005 - 15:26:03 CDT
Richard Wordingham wrote:
>> In the OpenType model re-ordering is specifically NOT handled at the
>> glyph level, but at the character level. This is why it only works
>> with standard Unicode characters, and not codepoints in what I've come
>> to regard as the 'Pretty Useless Area'.
> Do you mean 'OpenType' or something like 'Uniscribe/OpenType' or
> 'Microsoft'?
I mean OpenType. The OpenType GSUB and GPOS lookup types are not designed for glyph
*re-ordering*. There is no mechanism within OpenType to say 'take this sequence ABC and
rearrange it to ACB'. It is a presumption of the format that re-ordering, and other
aspects of language processing, is done at the (buffered) character level. Both Microsoft
and Adobe will tell you this. It was a design decision, and one that has been discussed in
numerous articles, discussion lists, conference sessions etc. for the better part of a decade.
> There's no mention of re-ordering by Uniscribe (or equivalent) or of
> breaking into runs by script - Step 0!. You have to read higher level
> documentation to realise that the characters may be re-ordered (or even
> changed!) before the font tables can affect them.
Yes, precisely. Character level re-ordering is not discussed within the OpenType spec
itself because it is not something that happens within the font format. The OT spec also
doesn't talk about the need for character level analysis of e.g. Arabic text to determine
which OTL features should be applied to the default glyphs for each character dependent on
word position and neighbouring characters, because that is not something that happens
within the font format. OpenType fonts are part of larger architectures for script and
language support, always relying on external shaping engines for a variety of functions,
whether those shaping engines are in Unscribe, ICU, CoolType, etc. The shaping engines
handle the character end and the font handles the glyph end; between them is some kind of
generic OTL handler such as Microsoft's OTLS.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
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