21–30 of 87 posts
One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…
Very interesting. I just implemented a text shaper and renderer from scratch with support for complex scripts like Arabic, Nastaliq and Indic (will soon post about it here on HN). Now that you write about it, the lack of stretching really is a deficiency in the OpenType spec. If you want a solution for this it has to happen in the rendering step, not the shaping (which is HarfBuzz's main task). The shaper has no info…
“Individual glyphs” :)
It’s Arabic, so you wouldn’t stretch a single glyph, id would have to e done after shaping so you can work out the next run (either a single Aleph or the joined characters) in order to know what is stretchable (then throw it to your layout step)
One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…
When carved in stone the lines are much straighter. When written with brush or pen they became semi-cursive. When printing was introduced, they became grid-like and regular.
What westerners who are passingly familiar would think of as the standard Chinese typeface - the strict square grid with straight-line characters - arises in part from printing technology. Easy to carve that into wood blocks, and easy to line up the slots into a grid.
Latin was similarly morphed to fit into the realities of printing in the 1500s. And is still being morphed. Notice how numbers 123... are in-line and at the same height as the letters. That's a very modern convention, typewriter and computer influence on our orthography. Traditionally digits were more likely to appear as subscript, off-centre.
One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…
I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their current joined form is the result of many centuries of encoding hand writing practice. advanced enough that falling back to a block form is impossible with the side effect of making simple mechanical text formatting also impossible.
As for Chinese derived characters. we currently are able to jam them awkwardly into our alphabet optimized structures(one code per character) but I wonder if a Chinese native encoding would look different. Would it make sense to try and represent the sub-characters present in each Chinese character in the encoding? I suspect not, Chinese works, but it also does not appear amiable to simple mechanical assistance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he's talking about the rendering algorithm with regards to the stream of text. essentially saying rendering direction should follow reading convention. on the other hand, in formal arabic, it's not unusual that numers are read in clusters from least significant to most significant (right to left). 1984 would be read : eighty four and nine hundred and a thousand. not sure if the author is aware of this
> rendering direction should follow reading convention. What does that even mean in this context? In a strictly LTR language, sure, you read left-to-right and the glyphs are rendered left-to-right. But the whole discussion is about bidirectional text, where the text is rendered by a complex algorithm. What is the “rendering direction”? I know just enough about some RTL languages to know that one can absolutely inters…
This article is wonderful. It's interesting, it's captivating, full with detail, and to think I never gave much thought about Arabic rendering before. This part nearly had me chuckle audibly: He says yes. The result is "Simplified Arabic": initial fused into medial, final into isolated, ligatures dropped. It conquers the Arab newsroom in a generation. Mrowa is assassinated at his desk eight years later, by an unrelat…
Is this a small typo? > The relevant rule, W2 of UAX #9, reclassifies a digit as an ARABIC NUMBER if any of the previous strong characters in the paragraph were Arabic letters, and as a EUROPEAN NUMBER otherwise. Both render their internal digits left-to-right, which is correct: numbers everywhere on Earth are read most-significant-first. Does the author mean most-significant-on-the-left? The statement as written is…
One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…
Both Latin and Chinese have been modified by the technology used to write them. When carved in stone the lines are much straighter. When written with brush or pen they became semi-cursive. When printing was introduced, they became grid-like and regular. What westerners who are passingly familiar would think of as the standard Chinese typeface - the strict square grid with straight-line characters - arises in part fro…
(aha i have found the answer to my own question: miniaturization for fractions in phototypesetting)
This article is wonderful. It's interesting, it's captivating, full with detail, and to think I never gave much thought about Arabic rendering before. This part nearly had me chuckle audibly: He says yes. The result is "Simplified Arabic": initial fused into medial, final into isolated, ligatures dropped. It conquers the Arab newsroom in a generation. Mrowa is assassinated at his desk eight years later, by an unrelat…
maybe AI will solve this ?
One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…
Conversely, English has a joined form(cursive) that is nearly dead because mechanical text assistance devices (first typewriters, now computers) work much better with the block form. While sad in a cultural loss sort of way the joined form only really makes sense when the text is hand written. I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their curre…
Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords, which has made it far easier to learn.