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

[Joao S. O. Bueno]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 2:13 PM Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode
<unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
>
> 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.


Sure. Anyway, a lot of the (~30 YOLD) recent font file formats would be
turing complete themselves - maybe lacking the ability to perform
any I/O  out of glyph parameters - but "type 1" fontes were
full postscript programs, weren't they?


> ~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