FYI: Practical uses of OpenType fontes as another higher level protocol

[Mark E. Shoulson]

Be careful.  OpenType fonts are so powerful these days they are 
essentially Turing-complete and can become an arbitrarily complex 
"protocol".  See https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/ which is a 
complete Large Language Model AI stuffed into a font, renderable by 
(almost) ordinary tools.  It's an extreme case, and meant to be such, 
but still.

~mark

On 8/20/24 08:56, Joao S. O. Bueno via Unicode wrote:
> Hi -
>
> Just got this news yesterday which I believe might be of interest for
> some of the participants on this list -
> People had successfully made use of mechanisms in OpenType fonts
> to be able to colorize text according to context. The practical use
> is for simple syntax highlighting.
>
> https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-highlighting/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
>
> This is a protocol sitting between unicode and markup languages,
> at the cost of having to be properly configured in any displaying app -
> (however, any app using proper libraries for rendering the fonts, and
> enabling font selection and parametrization would work "out of the box")
>
>
> This can also work as one more item to list in the "proper ways to do it
> in higher protocols"  when
> people involved or interested in Unicode are queried about
>   including mechanisms such as enabling color attributes.
>
> Regards,
>
>     Joao