Request for Information

Philippe Verdy verdy_p at wanadoo.fr
Wed Jul 23 16:47:32 CDT 2014


2014-07-23 21:45 GMT+02:00 fantasai <fantasai.lists at inkedblade.net>:

>   c) Text justification can elongate glyphs and/or expand spaces, but
> because
>      the script is cursive, cannot introduce inter-letter spacing

Cursive scripts can use inter-letter "spacing". in fact many OpenType fonts
fot such scripts include the necessary mapping to a joining glyph that can
be safely elongated or repeated or truncated to fill the gap and preserve
the interletter joining. They also use contextual glyphs: when the script
is horizontal, the joining glyph is typically an horizontal stroke but
there are case where it may be diagonal or split in three parts with the
central part horizontal and elongatable.

In the Arabic script this glyph is even encoded as compatibility character
(with some eastern styles used in Persian, Urdu or Uyghur, the vertical
placement of the joining glyph is complex)

But you can do the same as well for other cursive scripts such as
Devanagari.
It's possible as well for the Mongolian script (even if its fonts are built
with a 90 degrees clockwise rotation so that by default they render
left-to-right with lines staked top to bottom like Latin, and the
traditional rendering is vertical by just rotating glyphs 90 degrees
clockwise so they render lines top-to-bottom and stack lines right to left
(like with Sinograms, Yi, Tangut, Bopomofo, Hirag111ana, Katakana and with
old Hangul styles; except these scripts almost never need rotation of
glyphs because they are most often not joined in cursive styles)

In some calligraphic artworks painted with brushes, creative cursive styles
are very difficult to reproduce with a general purpose font: these artworks
are best reproduced with graphic formats such as SVG; that do not need any
text encoding with Unicode (except for the embedded metadata containing
descriptive plain text or alternated text).
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